Forecasting the Number of Migrant Workers in Thailand: Empirical Study and Discussion

Thailand has a large number of migrant workers which concentration in economic areas and high demand employment. The purpose of this study aims to predict the number of migrant workers who are permitted to work in Bangkok, Metropolitan, Central, North, Northeast, and South in Thailand. Time series data were theoretically used to predict using autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) or Box-Jenkins forecasting method. The results showed that the ARIMA(p,d,q) was appropriate to predict the number of migrant workers. Based on the lowest value of the AIC and RMSE statistics were classified by migrant workers in Bangkok, Metropolitan, Central, North, Northeast and South with ARIMA(3,1,3), ARIMA(1,1,1), ARIMA(3,1,3), ARIMA(3,0,3), ARIMA( 3,1,3) and ARIMA(3,1,3), respectively. Regarding the forecasting efficiency technique, the comparison between the actual value and the estimated value was in the range of 82.78 - 95.87% which result from the correlation coefficient. The forecasting number of migrant workers in 2018 showed that the number of migrant workers in Bangkok, North and Northeast was likely to decrease. Meanwhile, the number of migrant workers had a tendency of increasing in Metropolitan, Central, and South. However, the overall forecasting number of migrant workers in Thailand was likely to decrease by 5.68%.