Abstract
Thailand has now become the aging society. However, the fact that the majority of Thai wageworkers do not effectively save for their retirement may result in several elderly living below the poverty threshold during retirement. The objectives of this research article were to find the factors determining Thai wageworkers’ retirement contribution. Founded on the theory of life-cycle hypothesis, this article employed a sample of 300 wageworkers in the Northeast of Thailand and performed a statistical analysis using the structural equation modeling (SEM) approach using age as a moderator. The empirical results revealed that expected income, wealth accumulation, career status, and health status were the main constructs influencing an individual’s ability to contribute to his or her retirement. This article suggested that a wageworker should first contribute his or her income through wealth accumulation schemes such as investment in financial assets, for example, stocks, bonds, mutual funds, and properties, investment in other business as a second job, and simply cash deposit. The results suggested that wealth accumulation was the most important mediator allowing a wageworker to contribute to retirement effectively in the long term. This article also proposed thoughtful research implications for wageworkers, employers, and the Thai government. This article recommended that the government and authorized bodies (e.g., the Bank of Thailand and the Stock Exchange of Thailand) should provide more investment alternatives and improve investment knowledge of the citizens. This would allow the citizens to have sufficient financial knowledge to invest in riskier financial instruments that potentially give better returns such as stocks.
Highlights
There has been a drastic change in the pattern of Thai population during the past two decades
Incorporated with other latent variables such as health and career status, the aim of this article is to describe the act of how wageworkers in Thailand contribute to their retirement funds
It was found that an individual with positive expected future income and developing career status could greatly enhance his or her retirement contribution if mediated through adequate wealth accumulation schemes involving investing in financial assets and acquiring extra income from bonuses, an extra job, or owning a business, for instance
Summary
There has been a drastic change in the pattern of Thai population during the past two decades. The population growth rate decreased from 3.0% in 1960 to only 1.1% in the recent year (Samutjak, 2015). The change in this population pattern has resulted from alterations in mortality and reproduction rates of the country’s population, where mortality rates have played a relatively more crucial role in determining the pattern of Thai population. The mortality rate in Thailand is at the low level (six out of 1,000 people) (Thai Institute of Aging Research and Development, 2016). Due to family planning policies imposed by the Thai government, the total fertility rate (the number of children) per one Thai female had gradually decreased from 6.3 in 1960 to approximately 2 presently (Ministry of Public Health, 2014). In 2015, the number of aging population was approximately 7 million and was forecasted to be 17 million in 2020 which accounted
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