Manufacturing industries and technology transfer in Thailand

The objectives of this dissertation are to find the sizes of the impacts of changes in physical capital, labor, and technical progress on output in selected firms in Thai manufacturing industries, and the rates of change of quality indexes of physical capital and of labor in these industries, and to suggest policy implications for Thailand.;This dissertation is a study at the level of manufacturing firms. The firms are grouped into industries; thus, data are in the form of pooled cross-section and time series data. Factories established in industrial estates are used as the representative factories in this study.;The results are as follows: Although generally new-model physical capital with higher-technology was widely used in factories, change of output varied according to change of labor because the firms could not adjust physical capital to respond to output immediately; it was easier for the firms to adjust labor instead; however, it does not necessarily mean that physical capital was not important for production. The results show that the change of quality of labor of each industry was different, and that it is not necessary that if an industry had a high rate of change of quality index of physical capital, a rate of change of quality index of labor for this industry had to be high. In addition to the rate of change of quality index of physical capital, the rate of change of the quality index of labor is a major indicator of the rate of technology transfer. That is, the different industries had different rates of technology transfer to labor. The high-technology industries had higher rates of technology transfer to labor than did the low-technology industries. This dissertation proposes policy implications for technology transfer, and gives opinions on issues of the policy of investment promotion, cooperation between the private sector and public sector, language, education, research and development, and public investment.