Building Thailand’s Beveridge Curve: New Insights of Thailand’s Labour Markets with Internet Job Platforms

The Beveridge curve, which reflects the relation between unemployment and job vacancies is an important policy-relevant tool for better insights into labour markets. The absence of consistent and reliable data in Thailand, particularly on job postings is a substantial downside. This paper presents a showcase of how the Beveridge curve can be constructed for Thailand by exploiting two, related data sources: (i) the administrative data from the government-run job centre services and (ii) user-generated data from online job portals. We propose a procedure on how vacancy and jobseeker rates can be computed from each database, which may have non-representative coverage of users/stakeholders in the labour market. In effect, we also discuss the extent of the population representation of each database and confirms that each data reflects different segments of Thailand’s labour market. Finally, we demonstrate how the Beveridge curve can be plotted as well as re-introduce the measurement of labour market tightness for Thai’s labour market.