After THACCA: who builds Thailand's creative economy now?
The THACCA bill has stalled, but the institutional problem it was designed to solve has not. Thailand now has to decide whether its creative economy needs a new agency, or a better way of making the agencies it already has work together.
On 17 September the parliamentary website recorded that the Prime Minister had declined to certify four money bills under section 134 of the Constitution. One was the Creative Culture Promotion Bill, sponsored by Pheu Thai deputy leader Jiraporn Sindhuprai and usually called the THACCA Act after the Thailand Creative Culture Agency it would have created. A money bill cannot reach the House without the Prime Minister's signature, so the bill is finished for this session.
A week earlier the Creative Economy Agency (CEA) had announced Creativity as Capital, an event it will host with Netflix on 13 October as an official affiliated programme of the IMF and World Bank Group Annual Meetings in Bangkok. The announcement cited a World Bank Group assessment that lists creative industries among five industries of the future for Thailand, with advanced manufacturing, sustainable and wellness tourism, digital services and agrifood.
The two announcements were a week apart. One closed off the institution. The other put the argument for the industries in front of the finance ministers and investors who will be in Bangkok in October. The agenda THACCA was set up to serve has outlived the bill, and someone still has to run it.
Three different things
Thai public debate has run soft power, the creative industries and THACCA together for several years. They are not the same, and they have separate political parents. The Thailand Creative and Design Centre was set up in 2004 under the Thaksin government as a unit of the Office of Knowledge Management and Development in the Prime Minister's Office. It was the Prayut government that raised it to the Creative Economy Agency as a public organisation on 14 August 2018, with a creative economy policy committee above it. Soft power entered Thai political vocabulary a few years later, during the second Prayut term, when the Ministry of Culture's 5F programme (food, film, fashion, fighting, festivals) gave it a government label and a run of overseas moments in 2022, Milli eating mango sticky rice at Coachella among them, gave it a public one. Pheu Thai took the phrase into the 2023 election, and its version arrived with a new institution attached: the National Soft Power Strategy Committee, set up in October 2023 under Srettha Thavisin with Paetongtarn Shinawatra as deputy chair, and THACCA, which began work in early 2024 inside the Strategic Transformation Office while the law to give it legal form was drafted.
The words mean different things too. Soft power is the capacity of a country's culture to shape how others see it. The creative industries are the businesses in film, music, games, design, fashion, publishing, festivals and the visual and performing arts that turn ideas, culture and intellectual property into revenue. THACCA was one proposal for developing some of those businesses. When a Thai dish becomes popular abroad, that is cultural visibility. Creative economy rather is when a Thai company holds the trademarks, the formats or the distribution rights through which that popularity earns money.
The past fortnight supplied an example. Nene Royal, a sixteen year old guitarist from Phuket who was playing Naka Weekend Market two years ago, won America's Got Talent on 23 September, the first Thai contestant to do so. The government had already named her a tourism ambassador and undertaken to cover her costs in the United States. Aed Carabao pledged a million baht towards the family's travel, CP Group put her on a billboard in Times Square, and she opens for Avenged Sevenfold in Singapore on 13 October while preparing a debut EP. She came up through Phuket night markets and Thai guitar competitions, not through any state programme. The government's response so far has been the soft power one, an ambassadorship. The creative economy questions, who will hold the recordings, the publishing, the management and the touring income, have had less attention.
The Creative Economy Agency now makes the same distinction. At its Forum 2026 in January the agency valued the fifteen creative industries at THB 1.44 trillion, 8.01 per cent of GDP on 2023 data, with THB 391 billion of exports and around 980,000 people employed. Its director, Chakrit Pichyangkul, called the sector a growth engine. The agency's strategy for the year is about moving from cultural capital to an intellectual property economy, and the risks it lists for 2026 are AI, the leverage of digital platforms and competition over IP. The agency's own measure for the next phase is how much of the value Thai companies end up owning.
What the bill contained
THACCA is remembered for its events. The draft law was larger than that. On iLaw's reading of the Pheu Thai version, it ran to 104 sections. It would have created a national policy board of up to 31 members chaired by the Prime Minister, with the ministers of Finance, Foreign Affairs, Tourism, Higher Education, Digital Economy, Commerce, Interior, Labour, Culture, Education and Industry sitting on it by right. Below the board there was an executive committee and an office constituted outside the civil service, able to borrow, invest and form companies, funded by an annual state subsidy and allowed to keep its income instead of remitting it to the Treasury. The support on offer ran from registration, training and protection against unfair contracts for creative workers through tax benefits, start up subsidies and business financing to grants for projects at home and abroad. iLaw noted that almost every senior appointment ran through the executive and that the draft set no concrete criteria for the experts who would have run it.
Eleven ministers sit on one board because the sector is spread across eleven ministries. That is the problem the bill was written to solve.
The government's case and the bill's case
The government explained the decision on 22 September, after opposition leader Nattaphong Ruengpanyawut asked whether the four bills had been examined before they were turned down. The deputy spokesperson said the relevant agencies had been consulted on each. On THACCA, the government agreed with the bill in principle, but several agencies had said a new office with regional branches would duplicate existing bodies and add to the budget. Those observations should be taken on board first. Declining to certify the bill, she said, did not close the door.
The government's case is that Thailand already has the agencies it needs. The Creative Economy Agency, the Ministry of Culture, the Department of International Trade Promotion, depa, the Tourism Authority and the convention bureau all work in the creative industries. One more state entity means overlapping mandates, another budget centre and another layer of administration. Given the borrowing and investment powers in the draft, that is a serious objection.
The bill's case is that the agencies exist but do not work together, and that the lack of coordination is the problem. A body with industry expertise, flexible money and authority across government was the proposed remedy.
The same disagreement appears in the academic literature. A 2026 paper comparing THACCA with Korea's KOCCA identified three weaknesses: legal ambiguity, fragmented coordination and weak protection of intellectual property. The first has now been settled against THACCA. The second is now the government's problem. If the existing agencies are sufficient, they will at some point have to show how, between them, they do what the bill was written to do.
The argument over what THACCA cost shows why that is hard. In September 2025 the agency said its actual 2024 spending was THB 635.54 million and that the larger figures in circulation belonged to other agencies' projects. Apisit Laisatruklai of the People's Party said that with central fund top ups and soft power lines in other ministries included, two years of spending came to nearly THB 8,000 million. In June his colleague Isariya Phairiphairit put creative economy money across six ministries at more than THB 17,000 million, with nobody in charge of the total. Three actors, three perimeters, three numbers. Nobody can say what the creative economy costs the Thai state because nobody owns the whole of it.
Who owns what now
The committees that ran THACCA lapsed in August 2025 with the government that created them. The programmes have since been redistributed.
Incentives and market access have clear owners. The cash rebate for foreign productions stays with the Thailand Film Office. The Commerce Minister has opened a review of it that would favour Thai crews and local spending. Games sit with depa and the Commerce Ministry, which are behind gamescom asia x Thailand Game Show at the end of October. Trade fairs, content markets and the creative cities programme belong to the CEA.
Sector promotion has gone to the Ministry of Culture. Sabida Thaiseth's "ไท ไทย" policy runs through six working groups on textiles, the Unseen Thai Thai programme, film incentives, cultural products and marketing. The Strategic Transformation Office, where what is left of THACCA sits, told the House budget committee in July that its soft power budget was being moved to cultural capital such as Thai fabric and Thai food. An adviser to the committee proposed closing the Office.
Three functions have no owner. Direct funding for domestic production stopped when the committees did. The film fund that supported 86 projects last year has no successor. The rewrite of the Film Act that THACCA's film subcommittee had been driving has no published home in the current parliament. Coordination, the job the board of eleven ministers was for, now depends on whichever minister chooses to call the others. Jiraporn has acknowledged that the government kept several of the earlier projects and has asked how it intends to keep building the sector without the law. She has not had an answer.
The industry is calmer than the politics. M.R. Chalermchatri Yukol, who chaired the film subcommittee, wrote on his own page the day after the decision that the government seemed unlikely to support the previous approach. The following day he told Spacebar that the absence of a law was not a dead end, that the Ministry of Culture was still working, that THACCA's advantage had been the speed with which a committee could decide, and that results came from people rather than from organisations. Those are his personal views.
What other countries built
THACCA was modelled on KOCCA. KOCCA has had a statutory basis since 2009 and has outlived several governments. The same 2026 paper attributes Korea's results to decades of private capital, entertainment companies, export capability and accumulated IP, with the agency as one part of that. KOCCA was built onto an industry that already existed. That is the difference, and it is the reason the comparison is of limited use to Thailand on its own. The more useful comparison is across the region, because Thailand's neighbours have tried each of the models now on the table.
Taiwan chose the agency. The Taiwan Creative Content Agency was set up in 2019 as an administrative corporation under the Ministry of Culture, with a NT$10 billion cultural content investment project behind it, of which NT$6 billion came from the National Development Fund. It sits under one ministry, it does not have ministers on its board, and its job is to bring private and international capital into Taiwanese content. It is the closest thing to what the THACCA bill proposed, at roughly a tenth of the institutional weight.
Japan chose the fund. The Cool Japan Fund was created in 2013 to take equity in businesses carrying Japanese culture abroad. By March 2026 its cumulative losses stood at ¥54 billion, the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry opened a review committee in July, and in August the fund said it would not request funding for the 2027 fiscal year. Over the same period overseas sales of Japanese content tripled to ¥5.8 trillion without much help from the fund, and the government's new Cool Japan strategy sets a target of ¥20 trillion by 2033 and moves support to a project basis. Japan is the case for the government's objection: a well funded body with no clear function beside an industry that was growing anyway.
Indonesia has changed its mind three times. The creative economy sat inside the tourism ministry until 2014, was spun out as the Creative Economy Agency in 2015, was merged back into the ministry in 2019, and in October 2024 was separated again as a full Ministry of Creative Economy under a minister from a coalition party. Each change came with a new president or a new term. Thailand's pattern, with TCDC under Thaksin, the CEA under Prayut and THACCA under Pheu Thai, is the same pattern.
Britain has no agency. The creative industries are handled by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, an industry council that sits between the sector and government, and a set of tax reliefs for film, television, games, theatre and music. The 2025 Creative Industries Sector Plan puts the sector at £124 billion in gross value added and 2.4 million jobs, and its instruments are coordination, finance and skills. This is the model the Thai government is describing when it says the existing agencies are enough. The British sector was built over a century before the plan was written.
The four cases sort by what came first. Where the industry existed, the institution added to it, in whatever form. Where the institution came first, as in Japan, the money went out and the industry grew around something else. Thailand's answer to that question is the CEA's own figures: a THB 1.44 trillion sector with 980,000 people in it already exists. What it has not had is one owner.
What has to be answered
The government has said it agrees in principle and has named its objections. Any revised model, a new bill or a stronger mandate for an existing agency, will have to answer them: whether a new institution is needed at all, which functions the existing agencies cannot perform, and how the extra cost and overlap would be avoided. The CEA is the body the government pointed to. It is now describing the problem in something close to the bill's own terms.
Three other decisions will shape the answer. The future of the Strategic Transformation Office decides where THACCA's data platform and staff go if the Office closes. The film rebate review is the one instrument here that foreign companies deal with directly. The 2028 budget will be the first drawn up wholly under the new policy, and it will show which functions are funded and by whom.
The nearest date is 13 October. Creativity as Capital is by invitation, aimed at the Annual Meetings delegations, and co hosted by a platform with an obvious commercial stake in Thai content. The economic case will be made there. The institutional case has no date.
— Ben Kiatkwankul, Partner & Co-Founder
mcg-asia.com | Bangkok
Ben Kiatkwankul is Co-Founder and Partner at Maverick Consulting Group. He advises businesses and institutions on government relations, public affairs and business diplomacy, with a particular focus on Thailand and policy-driven markets across Southeast Asia.
About Maverick Consulting Group
Maverick Consulting Group (MCG) is a strategic advisory firm specialising in government relations, public affairs and business diplomacy. Based in Bangkok, MCG helps organisations understand how government systems actually work, build defensible positions and operate within the institutional, regulatory and political conditions shaping business outcomes.