The increase, which results in grouping provinces into one of seven different levels of wage increases based on their economic growth rate, was “appropriate”, said Don Nakornthab, senior director of the BOT’s Economic and Policy Department.

The average wage hike was approximately a 3.4 per cent increase, which was neither too much nor too little and was in line with an economy that has been continuously improving although not at the same rate everywhere, said Don.

Workers, especially those 12 per cent of workers who still earned less than the minimum wage rate, could get additional income from the wage hike and their debt burden lessened, he said. And that would lead to an improvement in overall consumption, he added.

Varying the increase based on a province’s rate of economic growth was also appropriate as it is based on the provinces’ economic and social contexts, Don said.

However, he said the anxiety over the capacity of business operators to increase production to support the higher cost in wage required close monitoring, especially among the small entrepreneurs whose main cost of production is often low-earning workers.

The BOT would follow the wage hike’s impact to the country’s inflation rate, he said. The business operators’ decision about hiking prices of goods would depend on how much the workers’ average income had increased, the strength of the economy at the time and the business operators’ competition.