Thailand’s Innovation: Taking Stock and Looking Ahead

Summary

Once the world's fastest-growing economy, between 1987 and 1996, Thailand has been stuck at a middle-income status for forty-six years. A consensus of opinion has been reached that the only way towards sustainable prosperity for Thailand is innovation-led growth. In response, the government announced “Thailand 4.0” in 2015 as a new national development directive that would focus on technological upgrading and lead the country to becoming an innovative society. What are the policies and projects that have really been implemented? How has Thailand fared before and after the 4.0 initiative? And what are the next steps the country should take? In this chapter, we seek to take stock of the progress made in terms of policy for science, technology and innovation (STI) and to track the current state of Thailand's innovation against economies within the region and its incomegroup classification.

On the one hand, we illustrate how the Thai economy is more dynamic and innovative than conventionally assumed. Since the 1990s, Thailand's development trajectory has been notoriously denigrated as “technologyless industrialization”. Even a recent study in 2021 comparing Thailand, China and South Korea arrived at the old conclusion that “The Thai case in particular demonstrates the limitations of investment-led growth strategies to sustain a country's industrial development. It has failed to sustain economic growth without indigenous technology development efforts.”

However, when examined closely, Thailand's technological development has not been that static, especially in the period since 2011. The country has undergone an impressive surge in terms of R&D expenditure and personnel. Private firms, both large and small, have innovated more actively. Almost a third of exports are high-tech products, and this figure is higher than the average of upper-middle-income economies. In the meantime, whilst engaging increasingly in global production networks, Thailand has been able to maintain domestic value added at 69.3 per cent of its gross exports (in 2018), which is a higher ratio than those of Malaysia, South Korea and Singapore.

For all its improvements and dynamism, however, there are certain hard nuts for the country still to crack. We present here the most updated dataset and raise concerns over issues of uneven capabilities among Thai firms and of the aftereffects of highly concentrated markets.