Abstract
Grassroots Economy is part of economy that creates and distributes everyday necessities like goods and services. In a developing process of state, grassroots economy takes a great role for providing economic opportunities for ordinary people in the lower class. However, the modernization of the society makes a large pressure on grassroots economy to formalize those economic activities. It leads an important policy issue how to adjust and upgrade the grassroots economy to modernizing society in inclusive manner. Street food vending is a typical job in such urban grassroots economy with informality in Bangkok, Thailand. Recently, two opposite policy approaches on street vending business took place. One is the radical public space formalization approach called the Policy of Returning Walkway to the Public (PRWP) led by Bangkok Metropolitan Administration (BMA) in 2014, and caused a huge decline of street food vendors (SFVs). Another is the Street Food Program (SFP) in Ari district supported by the Government Savings Bank of Thailand (GSB), which promote and upgrade street food vending business and has extended onto a nationwide scale since 2017. This paper aims at clarifying how to adjust and develop grassroots economy such as street food vending, with inclusive manner, in the modernizing society, by evaluating the policy experience of the GSB Street Food Program, while contrasting with the PRWP. We clarify characteristics of the policy approach of the GSB-SFP and analyze the outputs and outcomes of the program by organizing in-depth interviews to SFVs in Ari district participated in this program and the GSB officials in charge and processing the related statistical data of the program in the nationwide scale. We examine the GSB-SFP from the viewpoints of inclusive development and figure out some policy implications on what kinds of roles the government financial institutions can take in order to support the grassroots economy and how governments should adjust street food vending activities in the modernizing society. The result shows that GSB planned to launch the program with the bank’s mission to support the grassroots economy and the policy target to gain more clients. When the PRWP was heavily implemented in 2016, GSB approached to BMA with this idea to develop street food business. They reached an agreement to test in Ari as a pilot project. The GSB-SFP contains five approaches to support SFVs, which includes (1) guaranteeing continuous business operation on the walkways under the PRWP, (2) small loan provision, (3) provision of stall decoration panel and parasol designed, (4) knowledge development for ensuring hygiene and safety foods and (5) marketing support such as online payment. In the nationwide, the overall results show that GSB has provided financial support for 17,662 SFVs with the amount of 4,145 million THB loan. While, the knowledge support has 5,035 participants in the training course and more than 45,000 attendants in financial literacy course. Online payment also has a huge number of users as 16,998 users in GSB online platform. In conclusion, Ari SFVs can survive through these two opposite movements on street vending business in Bangkok and upgrade to a more modern street food vending business by the support of GSB. It can be assumed that GSB creates business opportunity for grassroots economy to achieve inclusive development by building capacity of SFVs through financial and knowledge support. Thus, street food vending business, as one of grassroots economies, should be empowered in their development process, and assisted in formalization to be included in the modern society. This will not only create opportunity for the poor, but also a better business environment and a lively neighborhood, which is part of inclusive development.
