Conflict, Legitimacy and Government Reform: Equitable Allocation of ...

Panel Discussion
I would like to divide my speech into four parts. The first part
elaborates about inequality in the Thai society. The second part answers
the question why modern-day Thai governments have not tried to
mitigate these inequality. The third part analyzes situations in other
countries that successfully mitigated inequality, so we know how they did
it. I’ll focus on their fiscal policies 1 compared to Thailand and analyze
what Thailand should do. The fourth part is the last part that analyzes
why we should uphold a democratic parliamentary system as a
mechanism that will eventually lead us to an acceptable fair society.
What is the degree of inequality
in the Thai society?
Inequality appears in many forms. It may be economic, social,
political and cultural status. Even language use and treatment may
display inequality. The language we use conveys inequality all the time.
We can look at the use of pronouns and words that display inequality.
Generally, we tend to take them for granted. My speech today will focus
on economic inequality which we can take the reading from statistical
information to learn how income and wealth disparity are among various
groups of people in the society. Income inequality indicates how much
standards of living differ. If we want to see genuine affluence, we mainly
look at wealth or ownership of properties.
Wealth: Recently, TDRI revealed data on property ownership of
various groups of Thai families from the poorest 20% to the richest 20%
as shown in Table 1. These data tell us that the richest families 20% of
the country collectively possess 69 per cent of the properties in the whole
country while the poorest families 20% collectively possess only 1 per
1 There is much more to resource management of the country for mitigation of
inequality than fiscal policies. In particular, there is much more to revenue generation of
the state sector for public spending than taxation. Aside from that, there are also issues
concerning state enterprise management, land management and management of other
public properties. Due to limited time, overview of taxation policy and state expenditure
will be highlighted.
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