The paper assesses the differential impacts of the Great Depression on different types of households in rural Siam. Based on the first two rural household economic surveys conducted in the country, it empirically exploits the exogenous variation in the pattern of rice cultivation and commercialisation across provinces before and after Siam was fully hit by the Great Depression. Robust to different specifications and measures of the exposure to international trade, it is found that the Great Depression, through international rice trade, significantly affected households that cultivated rice for trade more heavily than subsistence households, in terms of income, expenditure, farm investment, and real debts. The findings show that globalisation in particular the exposure to international trade, even for a small agricultural country in the periphery, had been translated into the exposure to the reduction in household economic conditions during the time of the global crisis.
