Thailand only rolled out its surprisingly controversial cash handouts in late September, doling out 10,000 Thai baht ($303) handouts to eligible Thai citizens in a bid to revive the country’s flagging consumption.
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Thailand only rolled out its surprisingly controversial cash handouts in late September, doling out 10,000 Thai baht ($303) handouts to eligible Thai citizens in a bid to revive the country’s flagging consumption.
Yet Thapanee Techajareonvikul, CEO of Thai retail conglomerate Berli Jucker, is already seeing the effects of the cash handout. “September was a very good month for us,” she says, nothing that the cash handouts helped boost sales even if they were only disbursed in the last week of the month.
Thai officials said the first phase of the stimulus could boost growth by 0.35 percentage points.
However, some economists argued that the stimulus might only lead to a short-term boost as many recipients will prioritize paying off household debt instead of consumption. Thailand has one of the region’s highest levels of household debt, at 16.4 trillion Thai baht…