Two essays on Thailand's economic *growth

The first essay explored how land registration and financial development affect economic growth. The motivation of this essay originated from De Soto's argument that "people in developing countries are poor because they hold assets that cannot generate surplus value" and from land titling programs that the Royal Thai Government launched to alleviate poverty. The paper employed a panel data set that includes information on 70 provinces in Thailand during the period 1991--98. The results showed that land registration has a positive effect on short-run and long-run economic growth. This result is consistent with the theory that people use land registration to access formal credit from banks and use the money to enhance resource productivity. For example, farmers are likely to use loans to buy new hybrid plants or machinery. The savings rate had a negative effect on economic growth because of land speculation by individuals who borrowed money from banks when banks did not have incentives for efficient monitoring.;The second essay investigated the effect of outward orientation on economic growth. This paper extended previous research on this subject that has either (i) assumed that exports cause economic growth and used a production function approach to investigate the magnitude of the assumed effect of exports on economic growth, or (ii) tested the causality between exports and economic growth and found that there was bi-directional causality between these two variables when single equation methods were used. Export promotion had figured prominently in Thailand's economic strategy for development and growth so it offered an excellent case study to examine the validity of the export lead growth (ELG) hypothesis. The second paper started by exploring causality between export growth and economic growth and found, as others have found, that export growth caused economic growth and economic growth caused export growth. Next, we employed a simultaneous equation technique that exploited state space time-series modeling to explore the role of exports in economic growth in Thailand. The result showed that a mixed structural time-series model is superior to a simple structural model. The result of the mixed structural time-series model suggested that export performance and "outward orientation" make major contributions to economic growth and that Thailand's export growth is dependent on the economic growth of trading partners and terms of trade.