Thai Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin has some good grounds to push digital wallet handouts to stimulate the economy, but should reconsider policy design, says Harvard Kennedy School's Richard Yarrow.
Education especially needs improvement. Thai secondary schools underperform their Asian peers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics , and college enrolment rates are deteriorating.
Even considering Thailand’s weak 2010s growth, the economy suffered a sharp fall in growth since 2020 compared with pre-COVID trends. Thailand’s slowdown has also been worse than those of most of its regional peers. Arguments that stimulus was tried and failed elsewhere are misplaced. Stimulus programmes in Japan in the 2000s and the United States in the 2010s were ineffective because they relied too heavily on monetary policy rather than on targeting households.