Thailand's Manufacturing Competitiveness. Promoting Technology, Productivity and Linkages

The paper contributes to the design of an early-warning system for Thailand by adopting a long-term perspective on structural issues such as the composition of industrial output and manufactured exports, underlying productivity fundamentals in relation to skills and wages, industrial linkages, and the institutional infrastructure for technology development. The research combines an analysis of time-series in Thailand with - whenever warranted - international comparisons of performance over a spectrum of industry-related variables. It concludes with a set of recommendations to the policymaker in the form of 'earlier' warning signals. These are indicators tagged to relatively slow processes of resource accumulation that ought to be closely monitored, since they bear evidence of long-term industrial progress.