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Over the summer of 2023, I spent time as a CID global intern working at Thailand’s Central Bank, specifically at the research institute of the central bank called .

Going to Asia for the first time in my life, I did not know what to expect. After receiving great preparation on development policy work through CID workshops, I embarked on the long journey, arriving in Bangkok eager to immerse myself in an intellectually vibrant workspace, eye-opening cultural experience, and an impact-oriented research problem. Looking back, I can now say that my experience working at PIER exceeded my expectations in every possible way.

Tackling high levels of debt for small-scale farmers

The first few weeks were dedicated to thoroughly understanding the problem at hand. Currently, 90% of Thai farmers are in debt, causing them to experience acute financial stress and fall prey to a cycle of low savings and intergenerational poverty. As we engaged with the work of Dr. Sommarat Chantarat, recently awarded Best Young Economist in Thailand, and the literature about Thai agricultural debt, we realized the severity and urgency of the problem.

To deepen our understanding, we left Bangkok to visit all of Thailand’s major provinces, talking with over 100 farmers and dozens of managers of the Agricultural Bank, which provides credit to the rural population. In each region, there would be very diverse accounts given, ranging from very low-income landless farmers to others who grew a variety of crops and livestock in their own land. But across all cases there were important commonalities: most cited the reason for the persistent debt was income fluctuations, which in turn led farmers to not repay loans so that they would have money during an unpredictable future shock like droughts and floods. The lack of clarity in the policies by the Agricultural Bank, such as their debt restructuring programs, was also cited as an issue. 

Building solutions

As the two other Harvard interns and I returned to the office in Bangkok, we chose two projects to work on to build solutions for the agricultural debt.

Our first project was to design the theory of change, performance indicators, and all the theoretical framework behind a Randomized Control Trial involving more than 24,000 farmers, to be implemented in September 2023.

Our second project was to investigate how farmers sorted themselves into groups to take joint-liability loans with the Agricultural Bank, which would hopefully illuminate why some groups were defaulting and others not. The data that we worked with had observations of 4 million farmers, and we were the first people in Thailand to wrangle and build summary statistics using the dataset; an intellectually stimulating experience.  

Impacting Thai interventions

In the RCT project, our contributions shaped the design, the implementation period, and the indicators that will be used in the interventions. Showing Thai economists how the most desirable output from the intervention would be a change in the farmers’ debt-repayment behavior, which would probably demand more time than originally expected, prompted them to extend the implementation time of one of the RCT’s interventions.

In the big data project, regarding joint-liability loans, many mechanisms of how the loans are given out by the Agricultural Bank were finally clarified, owing to the insights of our findings. By tracking four individuals over five years to obtain granular information about the loan process, we not only found out how dynamic liability works, but that peer screening plays a more significant role than peer monitoring in Thailand. 

The benefits of a CID internship and a future in development economics

Working in Thailand’s Central Bank was an amazing and highly transformative experience, for which I will be forever grateful to the CID, PIER, and the staff in both institutions.

It was a humbling experience to listen to the farmers’ accounts of their financial livelihoods and work with some of the most accomplished Thai economists, who had returned to their home countries to put their knowledge into action.

As someone with a deep interest in the field, this summer internship fundamentally shaped my plans on future studies and career. Captivated by the field of development, I dedicated my summer in 2024 to working at the World Bank, facilitating their funding program to over 330 nonprofits around the world.

Thanks to the passion for development instilled in me through the CID summer experience, I will be pursuing a master’s degree in Management Science in Global Affairs as a Schwarzman Scholar at Tsinghua University. From here on, I hope to seek more opportunities in the development policy world that will allow me to interact with and learn from local communities and people on the ground, while simultaneously becoming a thought-leader on the reform of global governance systems.