Explaining Thailand’s Automotive Manufacturing Success

This paper argues that the success of Thailand’s export-oriented automotive industry was based on three factors: first, the substantial public investment in productivity-raising port facilities and related infrastructure in the 1990s that constituted the Eastern Seaboard economic corridor; second, exchange rate depreciation that accompanied the 1997–98 Asian Financial Crisis. Jointly, these two factors made manufacturing production for export more profitable. The third was a combination of two key policy changes adopted by the Thai government shortly after the Crisis and partly in response to it — removing restrictions on foreign ownership and abolition of local content requirements.