Strategy of the economic development between South Korea and Thailand during 1960s-1980s

Abstract

This research is a comparative study about the economic growth in South Korea and Thailand. Since in the past, most economists would explain the causes of Thailand’s lack of progress behind Korea in economic policy differences. Thus, this research intends to compare the organizations which profoundly influence the implementation and context of economic policy of the two countries, in how the two countries develop differences in economic policy among the same circumstance of economic crisis and the world situation. This research also seeks to identify the shared points and differences in authority, roles, duties and structures and factors that contribute or obstruct to the structure, authority, roles and administration of the economic development planning organization in each country. And nobody had done research on issues before. Considering from external factors of both countries, there are much resemblance in many ways, such as, support from the U.S anti-communist aid, financial aid from Japan, etc. These external factors can be of great support to the government but internal factors that should contribute to the performance of NESDB and EPB showed significant difference between the two countries. The high stability of Korean government during 1960’s – 1980’s results in accordance with national economic plan and other economic policies, which was different from the situation in Thailand which lacked political stability, resulting in failure in aligning strategic policy implementation to the world economy demands. This disabled Thailand from developing an industrial revolution that suits the situation at the time. The implementation of economic plan in the initial stage results in long term effect of economic development and the GNP growth of both countries, which showed a significant difference between each other. The 6 factors which will be broken into points below influence a lot on Korea’s EPB to perform more efficiently than Thailand’s NESDB. 1) The law is the controller of the whole structure, roles and duties of the organization. The contrast between the Korean organization and Thai organization can be obviously seen from only the office act. 2) the personnel in EPB received sufficient academic and personnel resources support, retaining more experts in each field within the organization than NESDB. 3) Internal and external environment, EPB has academic support; KDI could utilize its resources to find advanced solutions to the problems. But in case of NESDB, with the existing lack of personnel, the existing human resources were divided into finding solution in this short period preparation. 4) Supportive and obstructive to the performance of EPB more than NESDB. 5) If the government is constructed with stability, the policy setting and development planning process would be continuously in line with each other. 6) Culture of South Korea contributing to economic development better than Thailand.