The paper highlights the important differences between the extensive margins (participation)
and the intensive margins (hours-of-work) of labour supply, in the case of Thailand. We use
Thailand’s Labour Force Survey to explore the evolution of labour supply at both margins over
the past three decades. We show that Thailand’s extensive margins of labour supply follow the
conventional life-cycle pattern of an inverted U-shape along the age distribution. However, for
the intensive margins, occupation types and education levels play significant roles in dictating
the shape of hours-of-work along the life-cycle. We employ a pseudo-cohort analysis to allow
us to track the same representative age-gender sample across their life time. While we find that
men supply more mean hours per capita than women, we do not find much marriage premium
on the intensive margin among those who worked. Marriage premium is highly noticeable along
the extensive margin. At all ages, women have smaller extensive margins. Female workforce
also reduce the margins more strongly when they reach older ages than men. In our statistical
exercise combining a decomposition approach with forecasting, we find that a policy targeting
raising participation rates work more effective than a policy on intensive margins, in increasing
the total hours-of-work of the working age population.