Higher Education and Thailand's National Innovation System

Source: Worldbank
Thailand has achieved impressive and consistent GDP growth over the past half-century in large part through extensive economic diversification. The country has become one of the world's leading exporters of products ranging from rice, to sugar, to rubber, to prawns, to garments, to pickup trucks, to computer components. Despite these gains, there is growing evidence that Thailand suffers from a significant gap between the advanced nature of its export structure and the much more modest technological levels of its own firms and labor force. The country’s weak national innovation system is a key contributor to this disparity. The Thai bureaucracy, especially the line ministries, exhibits fragmentation and competition that in turn discourage fruitful interaction with the country’s firms and associations, financial institutions and, most critically for this paper, educational institutions and their links to the private sector. The authors trace these weaknesses to a development strategy that focuses largely on jobs and foreign exchange; divisions among political elites; and a set of structural factors – weak external threats, demobilized popular sectors, and easy access to resources and revenues – that underpins this strategy and the political divisions. The overall result is an environment that discourages both the demand for and the supply of innovation-promoting institutions. Analyses of autos, hard disk drives, and rubber flesh out this general picture and demonstrate cross-sector and even intrasectoral variation in the strength of innovation systems. In so doing, they suggest specific parameters within which more progress is possible than is evident from a purely national perspective. They also suggest that sector-specific successes constitute useful models for replication.

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