Does decision in learning Chinese derive from economic reason? (A case study of Airline industry to an increasing in Thai labor supply with third language skill)

Abstract

The achievement of policy “Reform and opening” implemented in 1978 was successfully liberated new China from failure state to an economic superpower in this century. The success of the policy is not only elevating state’s financial status from the line of poverty, but also enhancing the people purchasing power. Being the largest population country in the world, a massive outbound of both Chinese tourists and entrepreneurs becomes a current global phenomena.

Thailand has long been a preferable destination among Chinese tourists for decades with more than thirty million averagely of Chinese tourists visiting Thailand, according to data from Ministry of tourism and sport. In regard to this extent, the airlines industry revisited human resource strategy by increasing the employment of Chinese speakers for the purpose of economic utilities.

The purpose of this research paper aims to analyze and measure whether economic reason is the main driving force leading to an increasing number of leaners towards Chinese language education. The samples, as a case study were consolidated from 153 respondents who are working in airline industries with the role of flight attendant. Through the purpose of study, the data and approaches are separately aggregated from two main sources: survey and in-depth interview.

Data from the survey, analyzed by proportion of percentage calculation, yields to the result that people are being motivated to learn Chinese, thanks to prospective benefits under economic reasons. The most influent benefits to people’s incentive are optimistic attitude to job vacancy, cross airline rotation and more flight incentives which all these were interpreted with the utilizing of Person’ s correlation coefficient.

Information inquired during in depth interview are constructive, and rolling to the similar direction to what the survey found. However, the section from interview leads to interesting implications over the result of attitude to job vacancy, and flight incentives in which there is an existence of gain and losses relationship binding up simultaneously.