In the case of Vietnam, where about 6000 households were interviewed in 1997/8, the penultimate module of the questionnaire (Section 14) deals with credit and savings. Respondents are asked detailed questions (up to 28 in number) for each borrowing relationship: from whom (including size and age of a ROSCA and, in the case of a family relative, what the relationship is and whether it involved borrowing and lending before), how much, when, why, rate of interest, what type of collateral, whether a family relative gave a guarantee, maturity, servicing schedule, whether any servicing difficulties are foreseen. For each lending relationship to a ROSCA, family relative or other person, a similar set of questions was asked. Also asked are the outstanding balance and frequency of use of different forms of savings, financial (savings books distinguishing between different classes of banking institution, government bonds, other bonds or equities or contribution to informal credit, local cash, dollars) and non-financial (gold, silver, gemstones, jewelry, real estate, paddy or other agricultural products). Note also that some information about financial services is embedded in the sections of the questionnaire dealing with income and expenditure: for example interest and insurance income is separately identified; as are insurance premium payments and nonbank financial asset acquisition (purchase of stocks or bonds or contribution to an informal credit scheme).

An interesting feature of several of these surveys is the geographical basis of the sample frame. In Vietnam, just 194 of 10,000 communes were surveyed. Thus the households are clustered in these communes (there is also a further level of clustering in rural communes, as two villages within the commune were sub-selected). Accordingly, general geographical information, such as distance to nearest bank need only be asked once, and this in fact has been done by administering a commune-level questionnaire, containing a section which identifies the main borrowing and savings providers, how far they are from the commune and what types of credit and savings opportunities they provide.<sup>15</sup> Note however, that the fact that only 2 per cent of communes are surveyed, a detailed geographical mapping of such information as mean distance to nearest credit institution for the households in a particular province is not available.

# _Other general household surveys_

General household surveys increasingly carried out by national statistical agencies outside of the framework of the LSMS can also contain useful information on financial services for much larger samples, allowing geographical and other breakdowns to be reliably considered. For example, the Tanzanian Household Budget Survey 2000-1 covered over 22,000 households. It covers education, economic activities and health status as well as household expenditure, consumption and income, ownership of durables and assets, housing, distance to services and food security. Under financial services, we learn whether the household had a bank deposit account, had received a bank loan in the past year, participated in a formal or informal savings group, and the distance to the nearest bank branch. Just five simple questions without any of the interpretative

> 15 The same is true for the Ghana survey where the distance to bank is asked at the community level.  Here about 300 enumeration areas were selected from a possible 13,000 stratified in order to achieve proportional representation of three main ecological zones in Ghana.   In Bosnia, a 6-way stratification of municipalities was determined before selecting 25 out of 146 urban and rura l municipalities to sample.

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