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Drawing on rural field research in three provinces of Northeast Thailand, the paper seeks to understand the ways in which life course, generational, era-defining and developmental change intersect, and why rural smallholders and smallholdings continue to persist notwithstanding deep structural change. We outline the creative ways that households and their members have sought to address the scissor effects of declining land holdings, rising needs, reduced relative returns to agriculture, and often precarious non-farm work. We posit, drawing on this work from Thailand, that while Asia’s ‘truncated agrarian transition’ goes some way to explaining the current empirical fact of persistent smallholders, we raise doubts whether the rural development agenda of modernisation, marketisation and rural exit will have the traction that governments and some scholars anticipate. A focus on production obscures how rural livelihoods also embody acts of consumption, care, reproduction and redistribution. Our study finds that the current experience of occupational multiplicity where households’ livelihoods comprise farm and non-farm, commoditised and quasi-subsistence, in situ and ex situ , production and care, and reproduction and redistribution will likely also persist, if non-farm occupations remains classically precarious and social safety nets thinly woven. The paper contributes to debates over agrarian and rural livelihood transitions in Asia, and sheds explanatory light on why the farm-size transition has not taken hold. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary Rural financial markets have grown rapidly in Asian emerging market economies, thus contributing to economic development and the reduction of poverty. At the same time, however, the level of indebtedness of rural households has increased, making households more vulnerable to shocks. One of the reasons for rising household debt is the ease of borrowing simultaneously from a growing number of lending institutions. This paper addresses two major questions. First, does borrowing from multiple sources increase rural households’ risk of over-indebtedness? Second, do over-indebted rural households refinance their outstanding loans through multiple borrowing, running the risk of becoming trapped in a debt cycle? Employing a dynamic random effects bivariate probit model for a unique set of longitudinal household panel data from Northeast Thailand, this study examines the bidirectional relationship between over-indebtedness and multiple borrowing to determine to what extent rural households become trapped in debt cycles. On the one hand, the results indicate that households in Northeast Thailand take on multiple loans, which further increases their risk of becoming over-indebted. On the other hand, our model results do not confirm the widespread notion that over-indebted rural households use multiple loans to refinance unpayable debts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from conventional solid waste management in developing Asian countries contribute significantly to global climate change. This paper argues that moving towards Integrated Solid Waste Management (ISWM) offers a practical solution for mitigating these GHG emissions and for realising socio-economic as well as other environmental benefits. The study assesses the GHG emissions of an existing ISWM system in Muangklang Municipality, Thailand as compared to conventional treatment from a life cycle perspective. The integrated system which recovers nutrients, materials and energy from the waste stream, and reduces landfill disposal of organic and recyclable waste was found to have reduced GHG emissions very significantly compared to conventional landfill disposal, which is currently the most common waste treatment technology in Thailand. Among the individual technologies assessed, materials recycling was found to offer the largest reductions in GHG emissions from a life-cycle perspective. The calculations indicate that a properly designed integrated system with high but fully realistic recovery rates can drastically reduce the climate impact of waste management. Most municipalities in developing Asia are small-to-medium scale and share many characteristics with Muangklang. Therefore, the authors argue that most municipalities in the region could apply this type of low-cost locally adapted ISWM system. This would have numerous sustainability benefits, including drastically reduced GHG emissions. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Summary: This paper examines whether recently introduced “village funds,” one of the largest microfinance programs ever implemented, improve access to finance. Village funds are analyzed in a cross-sectional approach in comparison to competing financial institutions. We find, first, that they reach the target group of lower income households better than formal financial institutions. Second, village funds provide loans to those kinds of borrowers who tend to be customers of informal financial institutions. Third, village funds help to reduce credit constraints. Thus, village funds provide services in the intended direction, albeit to a seemingly limited degree. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]