Household financial management in rural village of Thailand during pandemic crisis based on sufficiency economy philosophy

Abstract

Household accounting is an important aspect of financial sustainability. Every family must be accountable for their finances and ensure proper bookkeeping tendencies for several reasons. The objectives of this research were: 1) to study household accounting according to sufficiency economy philosophy in rural village, northeastern region of Thailand. 2) to study the correlation between personal factors and household finances based on the sufficiency economy philosophy. The sample group was 173 people from the village. The research instrument was a questionnaire, data analysis tools were descriptive statistics and inferential statistics (T-test and one-way ANOVA). Results of this study showed household financial management could help survive through an economic crisis (during the COVID-19 pandemic) with the highest level followed by fundamentals of sustainability and rural villager's knowledge in accounting aspect was at the middle level at statistically significant 0.5, the population with different factors in age, occupation, education, and a family member had an impact on household accounting and the population with different factors in gender and marital status had no impact on household accounting based sufficiency economic philosophy. In conclusion, rural villagers are poorly informed about financial management, which explains the poor financial sustainability in those areas.