accounting for only 11.45 percent of the total population, and 10.4 million people aged 50 – 59 years old. In addition, the number of working-age people is expected to be 46.2 and 43.4 million in 2020 and 2030, respectively.
Such a demographic shift will close Thailand’s “Window of Opportunity”. It is also called “a Demographic Dividend” which is an economic benefit arising from a change in population age structure through a demographic transition, a transition from a rural agrarian society with high fertility and mortality to an urban industrial society with low fertility and mortality (Lee and Mason. 2006 : 1). That is, Thailand can no longer rely on the growing workforce to create the economic growth and improve the standards of living of its people since the number of youth will not be sufficient to replace the retired working-age people, causing the dependent population to grow faster than the workforce of the nation. Moreover, Thailand may lose its competitive advantage, causing GDP per capita to grow more slowly and the standards of living of Thai people to gradually decrease.
To prevent such undesirable scenarios, Thailand needs to find the solutions to compensate the shrinking workforce so that the smaller workforce is able to create the constant economic growth in the long run. Certainly, one effective solution to this problem is to empower the youth population in the nation. If the shrinking youth population is empowered, they will definitely become the highly productive human resources who will bring Thailand the sustained economic and social development in the ageing society despite the youth deficit and the smaller workforce in the nation.
Opportunities for Youth Empowerment in Thailand
Thanks to the falling fertility rate (leading to the fewer children being born), Thailand has good opportunities for youth empowerment. That is, it has great resources, relative to the dependent population, to invest in many educational development programs. Thailand’s public expenditure on education in 2011 equaled 4.1 percent of GDP (See Table 3), higher than those in many developing countries such as