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Executive Summary

To ensure that necessary and efficient laws will be implemented without burdening
the daily life of the people, Article 77 of the 2017 Constitution requires the State to conduct

public consultation and to appraise the tentative impacts of a law prior to its enactment.
Following the mandate of the Constitution, the Act on the Rules for the Drafting of

Legislation and the Evaluation of the Law 2019 has laid down further rules and procedures
to conduct a regulatory necessity assessment, a regulatory impact appraisal and a public

consultation. The underlying spirit in both Article 77 and its derivative Act resonates the
global idea of Regulatory Impact Assessment or RIA.

The comprehensive regulatory impact appraisal, enacted by Article 77 of the 2017
Constitution and the Act on the Rules for the Drafting of Legislation and the Evaluation of
the Law 2019, improves the whole law-making enterprise in Thailand. The law requires an

agency to perform a regulatory necessity assessment, a regulatory impact appraisal and a
public consultation before and during the process of legislative drafting. The result from

these assessments will supply information to be used in the final decision whether the draft
legislation or regulation should be enacted. Moreover, the results from these assessments

will have to published and can be accessed by the general public. The comprehensive
regulatory impact appraisal does not apply only to ex-ante to the law-making process but

also ex-post to the already enacted law. Every five year, an agency is also required to
conduct an ex-post regulatory impact assessment on its legislation and regulations, as well
as to hold a public hearing with the stakeholders of each legislation and regulations. The ex-

post assessment would ensure that the law can accommodate changing society.
While Article 77 is imbued with the ambition to improve the whole law-making

process in Thailand, the implementation of the Article has been proved to be challenging
since the government agencies, the legislators and the public sector lack sufficient

knowledge and know-how to perform an effective RIA. To overcome this challenge, the
office of Innovation for Democracy, King Prajadhipok’s Institute granted Thammasat

University Research and Consultancy Institute to conduct a research on “Building knowledge
and Tools for Regulatory Impact Analysis” The research aims to create a comprehensive
body of knowledge covering both theoretical and practical matters necessary for the

successful implementation of the Article, and produce a case study and a handbook to
accompany the Practicum Certificate Course on Assessments for Law-making and Efficiency

of the Law.
To fulfil the purpose of this research, the research team divided the project to three

sections as follows; 1) A literature review on RIA covers topics on its definition, theories,