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The overall objective of the project is to extend the panel household surveys in Thailand and Vietnam to generate a deeper understanding of the development of income and poverty in their rapidly transforming rural areas. This data set aims to complement existing panels in industrialized countries by establishing a unique, multipurpose and long-term socio-economic panel in the emerging economies of Thailand and Vietnam. The data are easily accessible to the international research community free of charge.
The TVSEP project provides panel data of almost 4,400 rural households in 440 provinces in Thailand and Vietnam from 2007 to 2022. Next to the household data, also village heads and migrants have been interviewed in the context of this project. The panel project covers many rural aspects not only related to welfare dynamics, but also shocks and risks, demography, geography, behavioral traits, expectations or subjective assessments.
Within this long-term panel project, three waves of the almost 4,400 households were conducted in a first phase from 2016 to 2019. In the second phase from 2019 to 2022, two further waves were conducted in Thailand in 2019 and 2022 plus special COVID-19 pandemic surveys in 2020/21. In Vietnam, a further wave was conducted in 2022 in two provinces.
In addition, interviews with the heads of the 440 villages were carried out in 2016 and of 220 villages in 2022, complementing earlier interview rounds from 2007, 2010, 2011 and 2013 (from FOR 756). They provide important information about infrastructure and other village characteristics. The TVSEP household data have been supplemented by two migrant tracking surveys of 760 migrants in 2018 and 634 migrants in 2021, complementing the earlier one of 950 migrants in 2010 (from FOR 756). The COVID-19 pandemic severely restricted the data collection during the second project phase. Nevertheless, the project team coordinated by Hermann Waibel was able to conduct a special COVID-19 survey among 2,141 panel households, 220 village heads and 634 migrants focusing on in Thailand in 2020/21. This was not possible in Vietnam because of prolonged travel restrictions, which were lifted only in April 2022, as well as administrative issues.
Since 2016, the Survey Solutions software of the World Bank has been used for digitalizing the questionnaires to allow Computer-assisted Personal Interviews (CAPIs) with tablets. This procedure reduces mistakes with respect to data entry, facilitates data processing and improves data quality.
While data collection is essential in continuing the long-term panel, data analysis opens up new opportunities of providing evidence on topics such as long-term welfare dynamics, rural-urban and urban-rural migration, agricultural transformation, intergenerational aspects of households, and the long-term impacts of development interventions.
