9515306 Townsend This project employs theory, field work and econometrics to examine how credit and insurance systems work both in theory and in actual economies. The economies include poor high risk villages in India's semi-arid tropics, using the standard data set gathered by the International Crops Research of the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) and one designed by the investigator. The same approach will be used to study the entire national economy of Thailand, a growing economy with wide disparities in levels and growth rates of income, using the household-level data of the Thai Socio-Economic Survey (SES) gathered by the National Statistical Office (NSO) of Thailand, using multiple years of village-level surveys conducted by the Community Development Department (CDD), and using data to be gathered in field research and in a larger more standard survey. The work is extended to begin to consider the economy of the United States, analyzing business and household data gathered in the Hispanic community of Little Village in Chicago. The significance of the research is two-fold. First, because the project employs theory, field research and econometrics, it has the potential of making a contribution to each of these areas. Second, theory and data will be used to try to understand formal, informal, market and programmed credit-insurance systems in order to see whether or not there might be some scope for improvement.
