Raising the low productivity level of collective farm labor through greater capital inputs, and thereby increasing the incomes of members, presents a difficult problem not only because of a shortage of investment funds but also because the magnitude of the collective farm labor cannot be adjusted to the needs of production, as in the case of state farms; it is determined by the number of families living on the farm. The collective farm cannot limit the number of members who may participate in the work. Each member has the right and, at the same time, the duty to participate in the work performed for the collective, and the collective has the duty to provide equal opportunities for all its members to work and to earn adequate incomes; yet modernization of production necessarily brings with it an ever smaller need for manpower. A solution of the farm manpower problem was not in sight by late 1971. There was general agreement among Romanian economists concerned with the matter about a need to improve the utilization of the available labor resources, to increase farm incomes and, above all, to stop the migration of young people from villages to towns. No concrete program for attaining these ends, however, emerged from a national conference on farm labor held in mid-1970. Proposals advanced by a number of economists to expand industrial activities in the villages, particularly cottage industries and the processing of farm products, were questioned by others who feared that these activities would tend to drain some of the remaining productive elements from the collective farm labor force. As expressed by one of the conferees, the search was on for a hybrid solution that would ensure full employment of the redundant labor force despite the process of farm modernization--a policy that inevitably leads to the maintenance of low earnings on many farms because the available work must be spread among an excessive number of members. In this context, foreign observers adopted a wait-and-see attitude toward the changes in collective farm organization and in the method of payment to farmers introduced in January 1971 (see Organization, this ch.). They nevertheless expressed doubt about the ultimate efficacy of these measures because the income of farmers would still remain far below that of industrial workers. INVESTMENT AND CREDIT Investment