Thailand’s Industrialization: Overcoming Structural Obstacles?

Thailand reached a crisis point in 1997, after a decade of vigorous growth. In various analyses of the situation, the emphasis is generally placed on economic factors and their financial and monetary dimensions, without devoting much attention to the structural roots of the problem. Even before the alarm bells started ringing, a number of structural effects relating to the country’s growth model could be felt, especially in the manufacturing sector, but these went largely unheeded in political and economic circles (Boisseau and Simon, 1998; Raillon, 1998; Schwab and Nguyen, 1998).