Poverty dynamics and sustainable development: A long term panel project in Thailand and Vietnam, 2015 - 2024 Submitted as long term project

• Applicants: Professorin Dr. Ulrike Grote; Professorin Dr. Krisztina Kis-Katos; Professor Dr. Trung Thanh Nguyen; Professor Dr. Javier Revilla Diez
• Subject Area: Economic Policy, Applied Economics
• Term: since 2016
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 283672937

The research project “Poverty Dynamics and Sustainable Development: A Long-Term Panel Project in Thailand and Vietnam, 2015–2024”, in short the Thailand Vietnam Socio-Economic Panel or simply TVSEP, is a long-term project conducting primary surveys in cooperation with research partners in Thailand and Vietnam. The TVSEP project continues the work of the DFG Research Unit (FOR 756) “Impact of Shocks on the Vulnerability to Poverty: Consequences for Development of Emerging Southeast Asian Economies” since 2016. In the first phase of this long-term panel project, socio-economic data was collected from 4,400 households in 440 villages in two waves from 2016 to 2019. In the second phase (2019 to 2023), two more waves in Thailand and one more wave in Vietnam joined the panel. In addition to the household surveys, interviews with village heads and migrants were also conducted in both countries, special COVID-19 surveys in Thailand in 2021/22 as well as eight add-on projects which enable a deeper insight into selected topics such as risk and time preferences, data quality or consumer behavior. TVSEP promotes research on topics such as long-term welfare dynamics, rural-urban and urban-rural migration, agricultural transformation, intergenerational aspects of households, and the long-term effects of shocks in the rapidly changing rural areas of Thailand and Vietnam. The panel also covers many aspects related to demographics, geography, behavioral characteristics, expectations or subjective assessments. With the increasing length of the panel, it is becoming more and more attractive to compare TVSEP data with complementary panels from industrialized countries such as the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) or from African countries. The data is being made available to the international research community free of charge. The TVSEP project is well-established worldwide, as evidenced by the growing number of especially external users from the field of development economics. Between 2016 and 04/2023, a total of 161 external users used TVSEP data for their research. From 2016 to April 2023, 35 working papers, 2 book chapters, 24 dissertations and a total of 88 journal articles were published based on the TVSEP data; about a third of the journal articles come from external users. Considering the period from 2007 to 2015, TVSEP has produced some 113 peer-reviewed journal publications and 49 dissertations. The specific objectives for the third project phase from 2024 to 2026 are (i) to continue the panel data collection for rural households, villages and migrants; (ii) to continue applicants’ own research in their specific fields using TVSEP data; (iii) to foster TVSEP data usage and research internationally, in particular within the two partner countries, and (iv) to work on providing a composite/core panel data set to facilitate data usage after completion of the TVSEP project.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Thailand, Vietnam
• Cooperation Partners: Professor Bao Duong Pham; Professorin Dr. Suwanna Praneetvatakul