Department of Banking and Finance, Faculty of Commerce and Accountancy, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand.
PLoS One. 2023 Jul 11;18(7):e0288265. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0288265. eCollection 2023.
This study examines whether income distribution in Thailand has a property of scale invariance or self-similarity across years. By using the data on income shares by quintile and by decile of Thailand from 1988 to 2021, the results from 306-pairwise Kolmogorov-Smirnov tests indicate that income distribution in Thailand is statistically scale-invariant or self-similar across years with p-values ranging between 0.988 and 1.000. Based on these empirical findings, this study would like to propose that, in order to change income distribution in Thailand whose pattern had been persisted for over three decades, the change itself cannot be gradual but has to be like a phase transition of substance in physics.
本研究考察了泰国的收入分配是否具有跨年度的规模不变性或自相似性。通过使用 1988 年至 2021 年泰国五分位数和十分位数的收入份额数据,306 对成对的柯尔莫哥洛夫-斯米尔诺夫检验结果表明,泰国的收入分配在统计上具有跨年度的规模不变性或自相似性,p 值在 0.988 到 1.000 之间。基于这些实证结果,本研究提出,为了改变泰国持续了三十多年的收入分配模式,这种改变本身不能是渐进的,而必须类似于物理学中物质的相变。