Vulnerability and household risk management in rural Thailand: The case of Pattani Province

The concept of “vulnerability to poverty” has attracted the attention of development economists during the last two decades as witnessed by the increasing number of studies on the issue that emerge in the literature. The aim of this study was to investigate the issues of exposure to shocks/risks, risk management strategies and vulnerability to poverty using rural households in Pattani province. A sample of 600 households in five districts of Pattani province was selected using the multi-stage sampling approach. A
comprehensive descriptive analysis was conducted using SPSS to examine the exposure to shocks in general. The Logit model was used to analyse households’ exposure to shocks as well as their impact on their livelihood. The Feasible Generalized Least Square (FGLS) technique was then employed to measure the level of vulnerability to
poverty. Finally, the Tobit model was estimated to determine the influence of exposure to shocks on vulnerability to poverty. This study showed that rural households in Pattani province faced many types of shocks and they had employed various strategies in order to handle such shocks. It revealed that exposure to shocks, regardless of the type of shocks, had significant impacts on the various aspects of the livelihood of the
households. However, as for the level of vulnerability to poverty, only exposure to social
shock was found to be statistically significant. Nevertheless, the results showed that vulnerability in the sampled population was quite high at more than 80 percent which was much higher than the incidence of poverty in the sample which stood at less than 30 percent. These findings also pointed out how important it was for the Thai government
to improve its social security net which can be relied upon by the vulnerable to prevent them from actually falling into the trap of poverty.