Thailand and The World Economy

Climate Management and Paris Agreement: A Predictive Evaluation

Surender Mor — 2025-01-06

The present endeavour attempts to assess the impact of increased carbon emissions on the global mean annual temperature by employing an autoregressive distributed lag model (ARDL) on time series data for 1970-2020. The study aims to predict the expected increase in global mean temperature until 2100 by considering the mean annual temperature as the dependent variable, while taking carbon emissions as the independent variable. Additionally, control variables such as electricity from coal sources, energy imports, fossil fuel energy consumption, and water productivity are considered. The findings show that the expected increase in global mean temperature will be 4.1°C, which is higher than the temperature increase expected by the turn of the century. The conclusions reveal that the expected annual mean temperature increase is likely to surpass the 1.5°C and 2°C limits set in the Paris Agreement by 2029 and 2043, respectively. The study recommends a straight cut in global annual carbon emissions by 1.02% from the year 2029 and 0.94% from the year 2043 so as to meet the Paris Agreement targets and to make the planet Earth sustainable. Therefore, the study calls for technological solutions, strict compliance with the respective NDCs, technology transfer to the South, and quickly shifting to non-fossil fuels cumulatively to help the planet towards sustainability.

Healthcare in Life Cycle Economy: Theoretical Model and Simulation

Phaisan Pattanakooha — 2025-01-06

This article aims to develop the theoretical overlapping generation models with the unstable healthcare system due to the problem of missing trading markets between young and old generations. The main healthcare system in Thailand is Universal Coverage (UC) which covers around 48 million Thai people. The costs of the healthcare system in Thailand are rising every year, while Thailand has been in an aging society too early.

The theoretically developed models in this article show the main results that first, the different generations (the young and old households) could not exchange their healthcare assets. Then, the government needs to run a balanced budget to collect lump sum taxes from the current young households and transfer those taxes as healthcare subsidies to the current old households; this system is PAYG (Pay-As-You-Go). The PAYG could be sustainable if the growth rate of the population is greater than or equal to the households’ discount rate. However, under the aging society in Thailand, the average growth rate of the population in the last decade has been negative. Therefore, this system is unlikely sustainable in the long run.

The Impacts of Transport Infrastructure on International Trade in Lao PDR

Ta Van Loi — 2025-01-06

Laos PDR is a landlocked country with a low GDP growth rate of 6% over the last few decades. GDP per capita increased to USD 2,550 in 2018 and then dropped to USD 1,880 in 2020, which has been affected by the pandemic of COVID-19 since late 2019. The services sector is the largest contributor to GDP, accounting for 47% of it in 2018, followed by agriculture, fisheries, and forestry (17.9%), and electricity (12.3%). The fiscal deficit has been raised by external debts (WTO, 2020). The country is not only integrated with the three major trading partners, such as Thailand, Vietnam, and China, but it is also expanding to international and global trade following the improvement of the quantity and efficiency of transport infrastructure for logistics services. Currently, poor logistics services such as limited coordination among countries on border procedures, inefficiency of customs clearance process at the border checked point, fragmented and poor quality of transportation-related infrastructure, costly and infrequent shipping, delays in tracking and tracing consignments, delays in clearance of goods, the absence of cool storage facilities, and the inability to certify product quality can cause significant obstructing to international trade. This research will show the real situation and analyse some findings about ways for Laos’s government to chase the new trend in the world in smart transportation systems.

Gambling-Motivated Attention and Improved Market Efficiency

Anya Khanthavit — 2025-01-06

Information is incorporated into stock prices when investors trade; consequently, prices respond only to the information investors pay attention to. Because market efficiency requires rapid information dissemination and fully informative prices, attention necessarily affects the level of market efficiency. This study examines the role of retail investors’ market attention in determining the Stock Exchange of Thailand’s market efficiency. This unobservable market attention is measured using the Google search volume index for H̄ûn thịy or Thai stock and a daily sample ranging from August 6, 2008, to March 31, 2023 (3,573 observations). The autocorrelation test does not contradict the efficient market hypothesis, indicating that market attention neither improves nor reduces efficiency. Attention is then decomposed into two components: investment- and gambling-motivated attention. Additional testing of these two components shows that the nonsignificant result against the null hypothesis is the net effect of the inefficiency and improved efficiency induced by gambling-motivated attention. Noise trading induced by gambling-motivated attention plays an important role in improving efficiency by attracting the attention of sophisticated institutional investors. These investors then aggressively search for information to trade against and benefit from retail investors. The resulting trades incorporate new information into prices, improving efficiency.

The Influence of Firms’ Internationalisation and Foreignness of the Board on Sustainability Reporting: Evidence from Vietnam

Thuy Thi Nguyen — 2025-01-06

This research explores whether internationalization and the foreignness of the board of directors, two important international forces, motivate firms to issue sustainability reports in the context of Vietnam, a developing country. This study uses pooled and fixed effect multinomial logit regressions with a sample of 200 Vietnamese listed firms and 1387 firm-year observations from 2014 to 2020 to analyze the relationships. The empirical results show a consistently positive relationship between a firm’s internationalization and sustainability reporting (SR) in Vietnam, while the board foreignness is not related to sustainability reporting. These findings indicate that when firms expand their business to foreign countries where sustainable development has been highly appreciated and adopted, they need to clarify their business operations within the acceptable range of social values by issuing sustainability reports. Meanwhile, there is no evidence that foreign directors transfer SR practices from their home countries to Vietnamese firms, as Vietnam still has a weak legal framework and a weak culture of SR. While consensus on whether internationalization and board foreignness are related to SR remains inconclusive in the literature, previous studies are few and generally investigate these relationships in countries with high levels of economic development. Our study provides evidence about these relationships in a low-to middle-income country. Our findings thus support the legitimate and institutional theories. In addition, our findings also identify the role of specific external stakeholder groups, thus expanding our understanding of the contexts in which firms issue sustainability reports. Our research, therefore, has implications for policymakers and firm decisionmakers.

Exploring the Relationship Between Tax Planning and Firm Performance: A Meta- Analysis Approach

Arjuna Kumar Maharana — 2025-01-06

The paper aims to analyse the relationship between tax planning and firm performance using meta-analysis. A total of 13 papers from the Scopus and Google Scholar databases, comprising a sample of 3254, have been collected and analysed. The analysis has been done with the help of Jamovi software. We found that tax planning has an impact on firms’ financial performance, but such an effect is low. So, in addition to tax planning, firms should focus on other aspects to improve their performance. We have also applied meta-regression, which shows that firm age is a significant moderator of the relationship between tax planning and firm performance. At the same time, leverage is significant at 10% with a high R square. However, Firm size is found to be an insignificant moderator. This finding suggests that new firms should give more effort to tax planning, as the efficiency of tax planning in improving the performance of a firm increases with age and leverage should be given more importance while making tax planning for all firms. This study is the first of its kind to investigate such a relationship using meta-analysis, and it will be helpful for academicians and companies in making important decisions.

Firm-Specific Trade Effects of Economic Integration Agreements: Estimating Extensive and Intensive Margins of Trade

SUNIL DASH — 2025-01-06

By utilizing panel statistics of 1520 country pairs and economic integration agreements (EIAs) from 2007 to 2017, this paper presents evidence of the effect of EIAs on export margins, i.e., both extensive (firms) and intensive margins (average exports per firm). In doing so, this work adds empirical support to the relevant literature on trade margins and sheds light on a new “firm” aspect of trade margins concerning EIAs. Estimating a structural gravity model with exporter-time, importer-time, and country-pair fixed effects reveals that EIAs primarily increase the average exports per firm but have a smaller impact on the number of exporting firms. It further examines whether different “types” of EIAs have different effects on these margins and uncovers that the higher the degrees of integration agreements, the stronger the impact on average exports per firm.

The Model for Development of Service Quality According to Shariah Principles to Increase the Competitiveness of Hotel in Hatyai District, Songkhla Province, Thailand

Parichat Thudam — 2025-01-06

Muslim tourists are a large and growing tourism market. Hat Yai District, Songkhla Province, is the center of trade and business in the southern region. However, the number of Shariah-compliant hotels is few, and the services do not respond to the needs of Muslim tourists. This study aimed to improve the service quality of Shariah-compliant hotels in Hatyai District, Songkhla Province, and establish a practical model of Shariah-compliant hotels that responds to the behavior and needs of Muslim tourists. This research used a qualitative research method. Data were collected by using interviews. The collected data were analyzed using content analysis and descriptive statistics. The results revealed that customers could be divided into 3 groups: 1) foreign tourists 2) Thai tourists and 3) customers for meetings, seminars, and weddings. Muslim customers who want halal food and drinks were needed the most, followed by a qibla direction symbol in the room and a washroom equipped with a bidet, hand shower, or water hose. The findings also showed that the entrepreneurs used various strategies to provide their customers with unique services and create awareness of Shariah services by naming their hotels using Muslim names. The model for developing a prototype of the Shariah-compliant hotel to respond to the needs of Muslim tourists consisted of 3 key components: 1) customer needs; 2) potential and readiness of entrepreneurs; and 3) Shariah principles. The Shariah-compliant hotel model could be categorized into two levels: 1) partially Shariah-compliant hotel and 2) fully Shariah-compliant hotel.

The Relationship of Aggregate Herd Behavior and Retail Investor Attention: A Multinomial Logistic Regression

Phasin Wanidwaranan — 2025-01-06

This paper investigates the relationship between aggregate market herding and investor attention in seven selected equity markets over the period of 2004-2019. The multinomial logistic regression employed in this study provides a more direct, comprehensive, and straightforward test than other methodologies found in existing studies, as it demonstrates a true occurrence of herding. Investor attention is positively (negatively) related to (anti-)herd behavior, in which information obtained from internet searches is associated with rational and unintentional herding. Thus, internet search improves stock market efficiency. Nonetheless, the role of investor attention is weaker during negative market returns and global financial crisis periods because investors are less attentive to their psychological discomfort explained by the Ostrich effect. The results call for policymakers to gear to the digital economy.