Provincial Economies and Public Sector Employment

Abstract

This paper explores public sector employment in Thailand, in particular, allocation of manpower by provinces based on data from the Office of Civil Service Commission.  Public sector employment is assumed to have a positive relation with provincial economies (proxied by GPP), institutional factors, such as government employment policy and the provincial productive structure. The public manpower is disaggregated into 3 variables, namely, a) the central manpower, b) the manpower under legislative and justice agencies, and c) the local manpower.  Three equations are estimated against the set of explanatory variables such as GPP, percentage shares of industry and service sectors, and dummy variables that reflects idiosyncratic characteristic of provinces.  The findings: first, the demand for public employment is found to be responsive to GPP with estimated elasticities in the range of 0.47 0.55 and 0.56.  Second, the public staff per thousand population are ranked, from high to low.  Third, the Gini coefficient is estimated based on manpower per thousand population and found to be 0.11 which indicates a mild concentration of manpower in some selected provinces, notably Bangkok and vicinities