The government will revise its plan to provide tax incentives for domestic packagetour travellers within Thailand, expanding the scheme to cover individual tourists too in a bid to help tourism recover.
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Tax cuts to cover individual tourists
More than 80 per cent of Thai domestic travellers did not buy packages from tour agencies, so the government was asked to extend its tax incentives to individual tourists, in order to bolster all related business growth.
The taxincentive scheme is now with the Finance Ministry, which is considering the scale of deductions it can allow for domestic travellers. Originally, the government said the scheme would apply to packagetour travellers presenting receipts that showed the cost of their travel.
Public investment will expand only slightly next year as the Thai Kem Kaeng Program will just about compensate for the reduction in the government’s on-budget investment in 2010.
The medium-term outlook is sobering, with growth expected at 3.5 percent in 2010 and likely remaining below potential for the next three years. Because the Thai economy is largely dependent on final demand in advanced economies, a return to pre-crisis rates of economic growth (a full recovery vs. a rebound to pre-crisis levels) will require a combination of (a recovery of demand from advanced economies and a rebalancing of the sources of growth to reduce Thailand’s dependence on demand from advanced economies. Neither process is likely to be swift. Recovery from a financial crisis is a lengthy process that involves the rebuilding of balance sheets, and the IMF estimates that half of the losses in the financial system in advanced economies are yet to be recognized.
Thailand’s GDP growth remains largely tied to external demand and developments in advanced economies will continue to dominate the path of the economy in the short- and medium-term. The external environment has been relatively more favorable in the past six months as the effects of fiscal and monetary stimulus are felt and inventories in the advanced economies are being replenished, supporting production into the medium term. However, full recovery from the financial crisis and a return to high rates of import demand growth in developed countries is not expected in the near term, as US consumers have to rebuild their balance sheets following a decrease in wealth in the order of US$14 trillion while employment prospects remain weak. As a result, growth rates of high income countries are expected to be subdued at under 2 percent in 2010, implying continued weak demand for Thai exports
