cover image: Willingness-To-Pay vs Administrative Hurdles: Understanding Barriers to Social Insurance Enrollment in Thailand

Willingness-To-Pay vs Administrative Hurdles: Understanding Barriers to Social Insurance Enrollment in Thailand

1 Nov 2024

Many government social insurance policies have low take-up. To understand whether this is due to administrative barriers, information, or low valuation of the insurance, we study an unusual policy experiment in Thailand that offered a very large lump-sum incentive for informal workers in selected provinces to enroll in a voluntary workers' social insurance program. Using administrative data, we find that the temporary enrollment incentive increased coverage by 67 percentage points—from 6 percent of informal workers to 73 percent -- within just a few months. However, 12 months later, only 13 percent of these new enrollees remained in the scheme, much lower than the retention rate of those who joined absent the incentive. By using new enrollees' choices among insurance tiers to back out a revealed valuation of insurance, we find that those who were induced to enroll by the incentives value insurance less than those who enrolled without. Combined, the results suggest that low social insurance enrollment may be the result of low ex-ante valuations of the insurance, rather than administrative barriers.
public economics development economics poverty and wellbeing health, education, and welfare development and growth

Authors

Benjamin A. Olken, Rema Hanna, Phitawat Poonpolkul, Nada Wasi

Related Organizations

Harvard University
Monash University
Acknowledgements & Disclosure
Author names are in random order using the AEA author randomization tool. We thank Amy Finkelstein and Krislert Samphantharak for helpful comments. All views are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the institutions or individuals acknowledged here. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. Benjamin A. Olken The Bank of Thailand provided data access for this project. Our co-authors are Bank of Thailand employees. I am a director of J-PAL at MIT, the Co-Scientific Director of J-PAL Southeast Asia, and Co-Director of J-PAL’s Social Protection Initiative. J-PAL has no stake in the outcomes of any given evaluation results. However, J-PAL does have a position on what is considered a rigorous evaluation methodology. I serve as the Editor of American Economic Journal: Applied Economics for the American Economic Association, and the Co-Director of the Development Economics Program for the National Bureau of Economic Research. I receive compensation for both of these activities.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.3386/w33096
Pages
41
Published in
United States of America

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