The cabinet on Tuesday endorsed four new measures to help the elderly get jobs, find residences and earn regular incomes.
Kobsak Pootrakool, a vice minister at the Prime Minister's Office, said after the cabinet meeting that the first measure was a tax incentive for operators who employed people aged 60 or more.
The operators could deduct two times their spending on such employees from their taxable income. The monthly salary of old employees was capped at 15,000 baht and the proportion of elderly employees eligible for the tax incentive was limited at 10% of their workforce.
Elderly employees must not be a shareholder, director, or incumbent or former executive of a business.
The second measure was to support the construction of residences for the elderly, called the "senior complex" project. Such residences would be built on state-owned land, equipped with facilities for old people's conveniences and safety, and manned with medical personnel to take care of the residents.
Senior complexes would be built in Chiang Mai, Chiang Rai, Chon Buri and Nakhon Nayok provinces. Developers would be eligible for soft loans from state-run banks and enjoy certain returns and 30-year land leases renewable for 30 more years from the government.
The National Housing Authority, Government Housing Bank and Community Organisations Development Institute can develop senior complexes on other locations.
The third measure was reverse mortgages. Senior citizens aged 60 or more could pledge their debt-free residences as collateral and in return receive a lump sum or regular sums of the loan until they die or their loan contracts expire.
The loan sizes would depend on debtors' ages, the value of their properties and interest rates.
The last measure involves a compulsory pension fund for all employees of the government and the private sectors, government officials and state enterprise employees who had not been a member of a provident fund.
The Finance Ministry told the cabinet that within nine years Thailand would become a complete ageing society with elderly people constituting 20% of its population. At that time, the state must spend 690 billion baht annually, twice as much as the present, to take care of them.