The kibbutzim have surfaced in public debate in recent years as a sector which has accumulated a huge debt - about 4.5 billion dollars at the end of 1988 as compared with an annual gross output of about three billion dollars. The magnitude of the debt, amounting to about 12% of total GNP, makes it an issue of national concern. Government assistance became imperative because doing nothing would have involved much greater costs to the economy: the kibbutzim would have collapsed and their debt would have cascaded into other sectors of the economy, primarily the monetary sector