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THAILAND
Thailand located in Southeastern Asia with Bangkok is the capital and Baht is the
currency. It occupies the western half of the Indochinese peninsula and the northern twothirds of the Malay Peninsula in southeast Asia, bordering by Burma (Myanmar) on the north
and west, Laos on the north and northeast, Cambodia on the east, and Malaysia on the south. 1
It has 513,120 sq km total area with 510,890 sq km land and 2,230 sq km water. Population
of this country estimated 67,741,401 in 2014 with growth rate: 0.35%; birth rate: 11.26/1000;
infant mortality rate: 9.86/1000; and life expectancy: 74.18.2
Acording to www.worldbank.org Thailand is one of the developing country which
have a great development success stories. Due to smart economic policies which focus on
Raising Export Competitiveness and Improving Education Quality as the Key Priorities, it
has become an upper middle income economy and is making progress towards meeting the
Millennium Development Goals.3 Thailand has become an industrial and service based
country, but agricultural still plays a role to the economy. It can seen from composition of
GDP and labor force bellow.
Tabel 1.1:
composition
GDP and

Agriculture
Industry
Service

GDP Composition
11.6 %
32.6 %
55.8 %

Labor force by sector

31.2 %
16.7 %
51.1 %

The
of Thailands

(2014)

Source:https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/th.html

1 http://www.infoplease.com/country/thailand.html
2 http://www.infoplease.com/country/thailand.html
3 http://www.worldbank.org/en/country/thailand

Labor force

In the table above we can see that agriculture contributes 11.4 percent to the overall GDP, but
employs 31.2 percent of the overall workforce and industry contributes 32.6 % to the
country's GDP and employs 16.7 % of the total workforce. Although agriculture's
contribution to the nation's GDP decreases over the years, it still plays a major role to drive
the Thai economy, it is one of the world's largest exporter of rice and shrimp. 4 Thailand has
many natural resource such tin, rubber, natural gas, tungsten, tantalum, timber, lead, fish,
gypsum, lignite, fluorite, and arable land to produce agricultural products.
Thailand is an export oriented economy with exports accounting for around 65 % of
the GDP. The country mainly exports manufactured goods (86 percent of total shipments)
with electronics (14 %), vehicles (13 %), machinery and equipment (7.5 %) and foodstuffs
(7.5 %) being the most important. Agricultural goods, mainly rice and rubber, account for 8
percent of total shipments.5 Major export partners are China (11.9%), US (10.1%), Japan
(9.7%), Hong Kong (5.8%), Malaysia (5.7%), Singapore (4.9%), Indonesia (4.8%), Australia
(4.5%) (2013).6
Acording to http://www.economywatch.com the most important industries in Thailand are the
Automobile and Electronics. Automobile industries grew 64% in 2010, with 1.6 million cars
produced. This made Thailand the 13th largest motor vehicle manufacturing countries in the
world and estimated to be one of the top 10 motor vehicle manufacturing countries in the
world by 2015. Electronics is also one of the largest industries in Thailand. An increasing
global demand for high-technology consumer electronics such as wireless devices, mobile

4 http://www.economywatch.com/world_economy/thailand/industry-sectorindustries.html
5 http://www.economywatch.com/world_economy/thailand/industry-sectorindustries.html
6 https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/th.html

phones and computers, Thailand has become the favorable place for electronics industry
investment.
From the data above i can conclude that Thailand has a lot of resources to produce
goods and services. Its an export oriented economy so it has more export than import (it can
be seen by balance of trade). The resources may be most needed by my country (Indonesia) is
manufactured goods.