It appears to be common wisdom that the basic cause of Thailand's crisis is its extraordinarily weak financial institutions. The paper questions this proposition from an empirical viewpoint. It is well established that the long-term performance of Thailand's financial system is favorable. The...

The village funds programme in Thailand is one of the biggest microfinance programmes in the world aiming at improving access to finance and income in rural areas. Earlier studies indicate that the programme is successful in realising its ambitions to some degree. We extend this work by...

A data set of 560 credit files from Thai commercial banks is compiled. The loans granted between 1992 and 1996 follow a pattern known from mature markets as a similar set of variables explains much of the variance in interest rate spread. A second finding is the expected higher importance of...