This monograph emerged from our efforts to study the behavior of the households from the Townsend Thai Monthly Survey. This experience convinced us that imposing an accounting framework and creating financial statements would be a useful, indeed a necessary, first step for the analysis of household finance, especially from high-frequency, monthly data. We believe that this accounting framework will help researchers better define and more accurately measure household income, consumption, saving, and other financial variables, and in the end enhance our understanding of the behavior of the households in developing countries
