Educational Finance in Thailand - UNESCO Bangkok

4.2 Total Expenditure on Education
4.2.1. An attempt is made to estimate the total expenditures on education by the
household sector so that a comparison can be made with the government budget. The SES
household data is used to estimate the total size of private household expenditure to
attempt a first step at a “national education account” that would show the relative shares
of expenditure on the part of the government and the private households. Corporate and
non-government contributions are also estimated, so that a “national education account”
can be constructed, consolidating all the expenditures in the economy.
4.2.2. The Budget Bureau indicates a figure of 169,561 million Baht allocated to
education by the government in 1996 4 . Although budget figures and actual expenditure
can differ, this is taken to be a first estimate for the purpose of comparison only.
4.2.3. The SES data on education expenditures are “blown-up” based on the sampling
technique and the weights attached to each household type through the process of data
collection by stratefied two-stage sampling, with provinces in all regions constituting the
strata, and the administrative area (municipal areas, sanitary districts, and the remaining
areas) used as sub-strata. The primary and secondary sampling units were housing blocks
for the municipal areas, and villages for the non-municipal areas. The “blow up” takes
into account the probabilities of selection and uses the weights to determine the average
expenditure on education for each type of household in each area in each region. A
weighted-average expenditure for each province is thus obtained, and multiplied by the
actual number of households in each of the 76 provinces. The latter was obtained directly
from unpublished worksheets from the National Statistical Office.
4.2.4. Household expenditures in 1996 are thus “blown up” and the resulting figure is
86,650.2 million, representing about 51 per cent of government expenditure on education
in 1996.
4.2.5. Estimates of corporate and non-governmental contributions are made from data on
corporate/non-governmental contributions and scholarships obtained from the Ministry of
Education and the Ministry of University Affairs. This is admittedly an underestimation,
and more accurate estimates will have to be made.
4.2.6. The resulting estimates are summarised in Table 11 These preliminary figure show
that the share of the government in contributing to investment in education is around 66
per cent.
4 Even though 1998 and 1999 budget figures are available, household information can only be estimated for
1996 at the latest. Therefore 1996 is used for purposes of comparison.
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