Record Details

Townsend Thai Project Institutional Annual Resurvey, 2011 (Rural)

Harvard Dataverse (Africa Rice Center, Bioversity International, CCAFS, CIAT, IFPRI, IRRI and WorldFish)

View Archive Info
 
 
Field Value
 
Title Townsend Thai Project Institutional Annual Resurvey, 2011 (Rural)
 
Identifier https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/NUYSU8
 
Creator Robert M. Townsend
 
Publisher Harvard Dataverse
 
Description The project is carried out in Thailand under the direction of Khun Sombat Sakuntasathhien and dedicated staff. The project is administered in the United States at the National Opinion Research Center and the University of Chicago. Survey design and research collaborators include Anna Paulson of Northwestern University, Tae Joeng Lee of Yonse University, and Michael Binford of the University of Florida. Robert M. Townsend is overall project director and principal investigator.


The initial purpose of the NICHD-NSF funded project was to evaluate the role of informal institutions such as the family and local networks in helping to support the welfare and well-being of individuals in semi-urban and rural areas of Thailand. Risk, and the potentially adverse and direct consequences of household- and firm-specific shocks is a key part of project. The mediating role of the family and social and economic networks in the mobilization of savings and allocation of c
redit was also deemed essential. These networks are not viewed in isolation but rather are part of the larger village, regional, and national level financial system. Thus the project includes an evaluation of village-level financial institutions, such as Production Credit Groups and rice banks, and national-level financial institutions such as commercial banks and the government agricultural bank, the Bank for Agriculture and Agricultural Cooperatives (BAAC).


Indeed, the project has both micro and macro aspects. It seeks to evaluate informal and formal financial institutions and markets and to construct and evaluate macro models of growth, fluctuations, and crisis. The macro models are based on the measured micro- underpinnings.

161 institutions were surveyed in the initial l997 cross-section survey. In the annual resurveys we checked to see if an institution was pre-existing, but new institutions were added as well. Some i
nstitutions had failed. For example in l998, 45 institutions were sampled in total. More details about the Townsend Thai Project are available at http://cier.uchicago.edu/ .