Equity In Education Expenditure In Thailand

This article analyses the distributional effects of education spending across regions of Thailand, a country that purportedly seeks to reduce regional welfare disparities through decentralisation. It finds that public expenditure on education is neither progressive nor pro-poor, although there are sizeable regional differences, driven by the pro-rich distributional profiles of public tertiary education spending and public transfers to private education. Policy-wise, these results suggest that the current decentralised allocation of educational spending is not consistent with an equity-enhancing goal.