Updated: Costs of monarchy

For as long as PPT has been around, we have been pointing out that the monarchy in Thailand, while fabulously wealthy, is largely funded in its activities by the state and, hence, the taxpayer.

As recently as a couple of days ago, PPT posted on a funeral for a little-known royal that is sucking up a few million dollars. In another recent post, we pointed to a Forbes article that revealed that the state and taxpayer fork out a huge amount each year to “maintain” the monarchy.

The report claimed that in 2011, taxpayers ladled over $84 million to the Bureau of the Royal Household alone, and that isn’t the bulk of state funds poured into the monarchy:

once security costs are factored in, the government spends around $194 million a year on the royal family and its courtiers. This is in addition to the CPB’s income (minus its costs). This implies that … the Thai crown [annually] burns through half a billion dollars.

Forbes compares this to other royal families and says it is huge. For example, the far more transparent British monarchy “gets nearly $50 million” from taxpayers “but remits most of its crown property income to the treasury.”

In other words, the smaller Thai monarchy in a poorer country, takes about seven times more from the public purse.

Now, thanks to Freedom Against Censorship Thailand (our third post from FACT this week!), an academic paper by David Streckfuss is available. In it, Streckfuss makes comparisons between the Thai monarchy and other monarchies on cost to the taxpayer and, separately, the “cost” to democracy. PPT has only had a quick look, but it looks fantastic.

On the hot question of the monarchy making an oath to protect the constitution, the academic says:

The first metric examines the position of the monarchy within the constitutional order in Europe. Including all but one, monarchs make a public oath to respect the constitution.

On cost, this table really says it all (and note that the figure for Thailand is lower than the Forbes guesstimate:

Germany is included as a comparison with heads of state who aren’t monarchs. Swaziland is small in terms of population and a “banana monarchy” if ever there was one, so it is a ridiculous outlier. After that, the Thai monarchy is more than twice as expensive in terms of tax burden than tiny Luxembourg.

Read the whole paper.

Update: The paper is now available as a PDF.