Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are asking the question, is the business environment here in the Kingdom of Thailand "Anti-Competitive"? The reason I started thinking of this came from a recent article from Coconuts, that is coconuts.co, the article is titled: Here's why PayPal will be cut off in Thailand. We did another more substantive video doing a deep dive into the possibility of PayPal being cut off here but quoting directly from this segment of this article: "In a report of a recent clubhouse discussion, Johnstocker, a Thai podcaster and online tutorial provider, highlighted that the majority of business in Thailand is still cash based, which makes it pretty much untaxable. The new rules, he said, really only hurt everyday people trying to hustle in Thailand's anti-competitive marketplace." 

A couple of things here I thought were internally inconsistent. “The majority of business in Thailand is still cash based”, yeah that is very true and anybody that has ever been to Thailand and I think it is rather interesting sometimes I have to kind of nudge a bit of a paradigm shift with foreigners looking to do business here because they look around at Thais on the street here in Thailand, street vendors or down on the beaches who are just working odd jobs, selling things on the street, this and that, or they have maybe a little shop or a little cart and they are just doing business. In that way, I don't think Thailand is anti-competitive at all. If anything, at the lower strata of the economy, even in the SME space, you have a lot of competition and it is a very free market. In fact in many ways, for Thai nationals Thailand is a very, very free market. Now as you sort of go up the strata of the economy, I do see for example there has recently been discussion of a Bill in Parliament that might change the nature of the regulatory structure around alcohol production here in Thailand which some would argue there is a very constrictive, it is very captured market. I have seen it in certain publications called monopolistic for example. Now I am not going to get into the substance of that but I can understand the argument. As you sort of go up the ladder if you will, things can become less competitive but I don't think it is fair to call Thailand anti-competitive. If anything, again I think it is, easy is the wrong word, but for those that have a product or service that is in demand, the Government doesn't really get in the way. In fact one of the reasons I have been so annoyed by a lot of the in my opinion, hysterical and over-the-top measures associated with COVID-19 here in Thailand, is the fact that Thailand is so tolerant and so open, laissez-faire if you will and not the negative connotation of that, but it is very pro entrepreneur in the sense that the entrepreneurial spirit is alive and well, especially at the street level and in the middle classes here in Thailand. So I don't know that it is necessarily fair to call Thailand anti-competitive.

I can understand and in this context, yeah the cutting off of PayPal I have got my issues with that and frankly I don't think it is going to be good for the overall economy because I think that whatever "benefits" are gained from more taxation or control from an anti-money laundering standpoint and I don't know but I really am curious as to how much money laundering is going on that it would warrant what in my opinion is a rather drastic measure of just shutting off this platform. The fact is there has been a lot of foreign capital that comes to Thailand and moves around Thailand via PayPal and I can definitely see where this will hit certain freelancers, certain folks at the bottom of the economic strata here in Thailand, I can see where it could hit those folks the hardest. So in that sense yeah maybe the pulling of the plug of PayPal could be deemed “anti- competitive practice” if you look at it from a certain angle.