Earned Income Tax Credit Policy with Adequate Income as a Benchmark for Informally Employed Thai Workers
Keywords:
Informally employed workers, Thai economy, earned income tax credit, adequate incomeAbstract
This paper aims to review the current labour market situation and related public policies concerning informally employed Thai workers and investigate the effects of the adequate income (AI) and earned income tax credit (EITC) schemes on informally employed, low-income workers in Thailand. Although various national schemes are provided, both targeting informally employed workers and the ability to consistently co-pay, the prevailing social welfare schemes for informally employed workers in the Thai labour market remains problematic. By concretely analysing the data, we found that EITC can alleviate the problem by incorporating available governmental schemes with AI as a benchmark. This scheme could affect approximately more than 12 million workers, most of whom are informally employed workers who will benefit if the EITC is implemented. Despite the tremendous coverage costs, we still conclude that the programme is likely to be feasible from the financial and political aspects even at the first stage of implementation.
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