Townsend The Monthly Survey

In accordance with the initial project design, an intensive Monthly Survey was initiated in August l998 in a subset of villages from the original sampling frame. In total there are 16 villages, four villages in each of the four original changwats. Specifically, one tambon per changwat was chosen from the 12 possibilities of the initial 1997 cross-section. That tambon displayed relatively little variation in the collected environmental variables across the four villages, thus allowing for the control, in a sense, of the environmental variation across villages and for the relatively large variation across the four villages in the collected economic institutional variables: informal networks, local village institutions, and/or use of national level institutions. Again, this selection was consistent with a primary goal of the overall project: a micro-level evaluation of family networks, markets, and formal institutions in credit and insurance. As the selected tambon in each changwat was also surveyed in the initial 1997 cross section, 15 of the households in each of the four villages had been interviewed previously, and soil samples taken. A target of 30 additional households was added so that the total would be 45 per village. Thus the overall target is 720 households.