Book Chapter
Growth, Structural Change and Inequality

This is the last of five country case studies on income inequality, and looks at the case of Thailand. Following on from a number of other studies, the study attempts to re‐examine the relationships between economic growth, structural change, and income inequality in Thailand. After an introduction, the second section, Economic Growth and Structural Change, provides a broad picture of the Thai economy, and the third, Trends in Income Inequality, reviews studies on the changes in income inequality from the 1960s through to the beginning of the 1990s. The fourth section, Factors Related to Income Distribution, examines industrialization planning, industrial protection policies, regional income disparities, and the minimum wage bill over the past four decades. The fifth section, Analysis of Income Inequality in 1988, 1992, and 1996, presents an analysis income inequality in those years according to the subgroups and source decompositions of income; the final section summarizes.