Does the Village Fund Matter in Thailand?

Boonperm, Jirawan ; Haughton, Jonathan ; Khandker, Shahidur R.

关键词: ACCESS TO CREDIT;    AGRICULTURAL ACTIVITIES;    AGRICULTURAL COOPERATIVES;    AGRICULTURAL INPUTS;    AGRICULTURAL LAND;   

DOI  :  10.1596/1813-9450-5011
RP-ID  :  WPS5011

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: World Bank Open Knowledge Repository

【 摘 要 】

This paper evaluates the impact of theThailand Village and Urban Revolving Fund on householdexpenditure, income, and assets. The revolving fund waslaunched in 2001 when the Government of Thailand promised toprovide a million baht (about $22,500) to every village andurban community in Thailand as working capital forlocally-run rotating credit associations. The money about$2 billion in total was quickly disbursed to locally-runcommittees in almost all of Thailand s 74,000 villages andmore than 4,500 urban (including military) communities. ByMay 2005, the committees had lent a total of about $8billion, with an average loan of $466. Using data from theThailand Socioeconomic Surveys of 2002 and 2004, each ofwhich surveys almost 35,000 households, the authors findthat the borrowers were disproportionately poor andagricultural. A propensity score matching model finds thatFund borrowing in 2004 was associated with, on average, 1.9percent more income, 3.3 percent more expenditure, and about5 percent more ownership of durable goods. These results arebroadly consistent with the results from instrumentalvariables models (where the identifying instrument was theinverse of village size), which however show a smaller(marginal) effect. Households that borrowed both from therevolving fund and from the Bank of Agriculture andAgricultural Cooperatives gained substantially more in termsof higher income than those who borrowed from either one orthe other or from neither.