Cambodia – Thailand
Currently Funded Research Projects
Cambodia – Thailand
Project funded in September 2004. NSF HSD. First field season Summer 2005, my first planned visit Winter 2006/Spring 2007. Graduate students involved in project: Lin Cassidy, Risa Patarsik, Andrea (Brown) Gaughan and Michael Selover. Online database of imagery and long-term datasets which are already in existence currently being compiled.
Summary: Globally, studies of developing economies show that social inequality and cross-household variability of income growth is larger than conventional economic factors can explain. We hypothesize that environmental, social, cultural, and historical variation interact with economic factors and affect households, villages, and regions differentially, explaining inequality and a large amount of the residual variance in income growth. To test this hypothesis, we will examine social, cultural, historical and environmental factors and construct models of the rural, peri-urban, and national economies in Thailand and Cambodia, particularly in the Lower Mekong River Basin. We deploy the methods and insights of the spatial social sciences, especially spatial statistics, analysis of remotely sensed images, development of geographic information systems (GIS), and the testing and refinement of formal economic models based on new and existing empirical data sets. We propose here to analyze the interacting social, economic, and ecological processes that have affected economic growth, the emergence or intensification of social inequality and the dynamics of land-use and environmental change. The original contribution of our proposed research will be to integrate natural and social science analysis of distinct social, economic, and physical variables to answer the question of how and to what extent environmental and cultural variability affects economic behavior and decision making. The work products of the study will be: (1) extensive empirical data sets and conceptual models that relate both physical (e.g., deforestation, water quality, land-use change) and social (e.g., migration patterns, income inequality, cultural practices) variables to economic growth; and (2) tests of predictions made by formal models. The results of the proposed research have broad implications for understanding the whole Earth system, especially the ecological and socioeconomic bases of land-use, land-conversion, and resource sustainability in environments that are experiencing increasing economic activity, periodic social crises, and consequent environmental degradation.
Research Narrative
