Thailand’s OECD Bid Is Colliding With Its Oligopoly Problem

Key Points

Thailand’s journey to join the OECD by 2028 involves rethinking its approach to inequality. Policymakers must broaden their perspective beyond taxation and welfare. They need to integrate competition policy as a core strategy to tackle inequality effectively. This shift requires fostering a fairer market environment where small and medium-sized enterprises can thrive, ensuring that economic growth benefits all segments of society.

These are not the same problem, and the failure to distinguish between them is a large part of why so little has changed.

The uncomfortable reality is this: Thailand’s wealthiest households are not simply outearning everyone else. In many cases, they are the same conglomerates that dominate the industries they operate in, from telecommunications and energy to beverages, retail and airport concessions, with too little regulatory friction to prevent market dominance from converting directly into personal fortune. 

In markets with few genuine competitors, the winners do not just accumulate wealth. They tend to keep it, almost regardless of how well they actually perform.

Telecom offers the clearest illustration.

In 2023, True Corporation and DTAC, then Thailand’s second and third largest mobile operators, completed a merger that reduced the number of major carriers from three to two. That alone warranted serious scrutiny. Instead, the deal fell into a regulatory gap. 

The Trade Competition Commission does not oversee telecom mergers, and the sector’s dedicated regulator, the National Broadcasting and Telecommunications Commission, determined that the transaction did not technically qualify as an “acquisition.” 

The two companies had described it as an “amalgamation,” a legal distinction that placed the deal outside the commission’s approval authority. Rather than being approved or rejected, the merger was simply acknowledged, with conditions attached. No regulator with clear authority ever rendered a formal judgment on it.

The consequences followed a predictable pattern. True Corporation’s average revenue per user has risen since the merger, while cheaper mobile plans have become harder to find. That outcome is not incidental. It is what tends to happen when competitive pressure is removed and no regulatory body is positioned to notice or respond.

This is a pattern, not an isolated case.

True Corporation is partly owned by Charoen Pokphand Group, Thailand’s largest conglomerate, with interests spanning agriculture, food, retail, automobiles and telecommunications. Its leaders, the Chearavanont brothers, rank near the top of the country’s rich list. Close behind is Sarath Ratanavadi of Gulf Development, which is also the principal shareholder behind AIS, the country’s other major mobile carrier. Add Charoen Sirivadhanabhakdi’s beverage business and the Srivaddhanaprabha family’s airport duty-free operations, and a small number of firms account for a striking share of the country’s concentrated wealth.

This is not merely a matter of historical accumulation. It is recurring in the industries that will shape Thailand’s coming decade. When virtual banking licenses were approved in mid-2025, the successful applicants included CP Group, two of the country’s established banks and PTT, the state oil company. When the Board of Investment approved data center projects in early 2026, five of the seven were linked to True Corporation, Gulf Development or AIS. The names change little, even as the frontier does.

Why this matters more than the inequality figures alone

The figures themselves are stark. Thailand’s wealthiest one percent hold roughly a third of national wealth, and the next nine percent hold close to another third, leaving the bottom half of the population with approximately 3.5 percent. 

But figures of this kind tend to invite responses centered on taxation or redistribution. That response misses the underlying mechanism. If weak competition enforcement is the root cause, redistributing income after the fact addresses a symptom while leaving the structure that produces the imbalance largely untouched.

Some scholars trace this dynamic to the Prayuth Chan-o-cha era, arguing that Thailand has drifted toward a form of hierarchical capitalism in which a small circle of conglomerates now effectively shapes national economic direction. 

The comparison with South Korea and Taiwan is instructive. Large firms in those economies also received substantial state support, but that support came with defined expectations: industrial upgrading, export performance, alignment with long-term national strategy. Thai conglomerates have often gained comparable scale and protection without equivalent obligations attached.

What genuine reform would require

The OECD’s 2025 review identified concrete, addressable weaknesses: opaque procedures for selecting Trade Competition Commission board members, unclear investigative rules and, most consequentially, ambiguous jurisdiction between regulators. 

That last weakness is precisely what allowed the True-DTAC merger to escape meaningful review. When a transaction can avoid scrutiny simply by being classified under the right legal term, the underlying law is not functioning as intended.

Thailand does not need a campaign against large enterprise. It needs a Trade Competition Commission with clear, enforceable jurisdiction over sectors, such as telecommunications, that currently fall outside its reach through regulatory ambiguity. It needs transparent oversight of who gains control of emerging markets, including virtual banking and data infrastructure, before those markets settle around the same handful of family-controlled firms. And it needs to stop treating OECD accession as a matter of technical compliance, when the more difficult obstacle is a political economy that has, for years, quietly determined who is permitted to compete and who is simply positioned to collect the returns.

Address the competition problem, and the wealth problem begins to correct itself. Leave it unaddressed, and Thailand may join every international body it seeks membership in without the underlying concentration shifting at all.