Financial Lives and the Vicious Cycle of Debt among Thai Agricultural Households

Sommarat Chantarat, Chayanee Chawanote, Lathaporn Ratanavararak, Chonnakan Rittinon, Boontida Sa-ngimnet and Narongrit Adultananusak

No 204, PIER Discussion Papers from Puey Ungphakorn Institute for Economic Research

Abstract: This paper aims to explore drivers and dynamics of Thai agricultural households’ vicious cycle of debt, currently impeding their development prospects. We use unique combination of nationwide representative survey of 720 households and longitudinal administrative and financial account data from the farmer registration, the Bank of Agriculture and Agricultural Cooperatives (BAAC) and the National Credit Bureau (NCB) to reflect households’ financial problems from the lens of monthly income and expenditure flows, their financial attitudes and use of financial services from all sources to smooth consumption and debt dynamics and repayment behavior. The paper also tries to renew our understanding since Siamwalla et al. (1990) on the economic problems in Thai rural financial market and attempts to identify adverse impacts of debt moratorium policies, which are among the country’s most extensive policies aiming to help Thai agricultural households. The unique granularity and coverage of our data allow us to provide better understanding of the dynamics of problems and the heterogenous patterns across households – necessary to shed some lights for the redesign of rural financial system and sustainable farmers’ debt policies.

Keywords: Agricultural households; Financial behavior; Household debt; Policies; Rural financial market; Thailand (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D82 G20 G28 O12 O16 Q12 Q14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 58 pages
Date: 2023-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-ban, nep-hme, nep-mfd and nep-sea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.pier.or.th/files/dp/pier_dp_204.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pui:dpaper:204

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://www.pier.or.th/en/dp/204/

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in PIER Discussion Papers from Puey Ungphakorn Institute for Economic Research Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().