Efficiency of Household Financial Management in Phayao Province

Abstract

The purposes of this research are to evaluate the household financial management efficiency and to study the factors influencing household financial management efficiency in Phayao province. A survey with responses from 383 households was obtained by stratified random sampling. The research instrument is a questionnaire which collected information on 1) socio-demographic information: gender, age, education level, and number of children; 2) household financial information: income, expense, debt, and saving; 3) household financial management: cash flow, credit, saving, and investment. In accordance with the research purposes, the researcher used path analysis to study the effect of socio-demographics and household financial information on household financial management efficiency. This research found two important points which could be summarized as follows.

1. The result showed that overall household financial management efficiency is at a moderate level with an average score of 8.49 of the total 16.00 (2.99 for credit management, 2.27 for saving management, 1.86 for cash flow management, and 1.37 for investment management).

          2. The evidence from path analysis showed a significant positive effect of education level, regular income, extra income, household consumption expense, and amount of savings on household financial management efficiency. On the contrary, household medical expense had negatively affected household financial management efficiency.