This is only my second post for a week. Sorry! I have been caught up with fieldwork in a village in northern Thailand. As I mentioned in the last post there has been a lot of rice planting; several village meetings discussing various “projects” and their “budgets”; and plenty of fried tadpoles from the paddy fields to accompany an evening beer or whiskey. During the week a journalist from the International Herald Tribune managed to track me down to ask my opinions about some recent data on Mekong River trade between Thailand and China. The results of our discussion are here.

I will post some more information about this recent period of fieldwork over the next week or so, including some interesting local information on the much maligned one million baht village fund.