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

42 KPI Congress XI
country’s population possesses over 100 rai but the remainder or 90 per
cent of the population possesses only one rai or less. Around 811,871
Thai families don’t have their own land. Moreover, around 1-1.5 million
farmer households don’t have enough lands to make a living and have to
rent lands for their livelihood. (Preecha; 2001; cited in Duangmanee
2009: 6-8)
The above statistics indicate that wealth concentration in our
society lies in the hands of a marginal number of people, which is less
than 10 per cent of the country. Moreover, it’s highly likely that these
different types of property owners are interlinked, meaning actually they
are the same clans. There is a tendency that people who have a lot of
deposits also own a large quantity of stocks in the stock market and a lot
of lands. Moreover, children and grandchildren of these people tend to
relate to each other in some kinds of family relationship, as the saying
goes “boat sinks in a swamp, where will the gold go?”
Income distribution: We have plenty of data on this. This is
because the National Statistical Office regularly conducts nationwide
surveys on household income and expenditure in Thailand, which
enables us to divide household groups into various income groups,
ranging from the lowest to the highest, and calculate proportions of
household income of different groups in GDP of the entire country.