Chronicles from the Field: The Townsend Thai Project by Robert M. Townsend.

• Author: Uneke, Okori
• Position: Book review

Townsend, Robert M., Sombat Sakunthasathien, and Rob Jordan. Chronicles from the Field: The Townsend Thai Project. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2013. xi + 135 pages. Hardcover, $35.00.

Chronicles from the Field provides a narrative of the origins and operations of the Townsend Thai Project (TTP), the longest running and largest household survey in the developing world. The project started in 1997 and has tracked millions of observations about the financial and entrepreneurial activities of households and institutions, first in rural and, then urban Thailand. The objective of the project was to bridge the gap between academic research and policy design. As the authors, economists Robert M. Townsend and Sombat Sakunthasathien and journalist Rob Jordan, observe: "Many economic and social policies are implemented without the requisite data or appropriate frameworks for analysis. Instead, prior convictions, political considerations, and the advice of outside experts drive policy making. While well intended, such policies can adversely affect those they seek to help" (p. vii). In effect, social and economic policies are often skewed by political considerations. Against this backdrop, TTP offers an alternative basis for policy: collecting extensive data and accurate measurement in the hope of better providing informed economic and social policy. Furthermore, from thoroughly collected data, a framework emerges for understanding poverty and identifying paths to alleviate it.

The book details how the Thai project originated, as well as the challenges and rewards that stem from research designed to understand better the process of economic development within a country. It explores what the project means to the people who jumpstart the growth in development or get trapped in it, whether negatively or positively. As a human-interest story, the narrative touches on the lives of the actors, including the field enumerators and the families and households under study.

The Townsend Thai Project was the brainchild of Robert Townsend, an economics professor at MIT, and Sombat Sakunthasathien, now director of the Thai Family Research Project (TFRP). Townsend was interested in how issues such as risk and insurance affected village economies, while his colleague was concerned with research on banking in rural economies. Prior to the TTP, Sombat had conducted a study on how to create a credit program for the poor hillside peasants. Thus the TTP emerged out of this...