local governments depend heavily on the national government’s decisions on how much power and revenue to share (Krueathep, 2004). Despite the plan stipulating that 35 percent of total revenue of the national government in each fiscal year must be allocated to local governments by 2006, in practice over the past years the share was somewhere around 25 to 27 percent. After the 2006 coup, the proportion of central government’s revenue allocated to local governments had been relatively stagnant.