Doing Business in Thailand

I enjoyed checking from time to time studies and ranking about Thailand performance in today’s world. Now one study were Thailand is not doing good at all is the World Bank studies of the Shadow Economies.

Of course this comment must be pondered. Firstly while the study was only recently published the period under consideration in the studies was the period from 1999 up to 2007 and we might hope that Thailand has done some progress since then.

What is a shadow economy?

In this study the shadow economy is defined as including all market-based legal production of goods and services that are deliberately concealed from public authorities for any of the following reasons:

 (1) to avoid payment of income, value added or other taxes,

(2) to avoid payment of social security contributions,

(3) to avoid having to meet certain legal labor market standards, such as minimum wages, maximum working hours, safety standards, etc., and

(4) to avoid complying with certain administrative procedures,

Now, out of 120 countries ranked for the size of their Shadows Economy in comparison to their official economy Thailand did quite poorly with a 143 ranking out of 151 and an average percentage of 51% of average shadow economy over the period.

Cost of Tax Abuse for Thailand?

Now what is for Thailand the cost of the  the tax abuse resulting from Thai Shadow Economy. In another survey published in November 2011 a british accountant Richard Murphy estimated that the cost of the tax evasion resultin from the shadow economy was 776,999 millions THB a quite impressive figure and that in terms of  the amount of tax evasion Thailand was ranking 24 out of 145 economies surveyed.

Another survey where Thailand failed to impress

Originally posted 2012-01-26 17:10:46.