Joshua Kurlantzick, a fellow for Southeast Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations, has a piece in Newsweek provocatively entitled “The End of Brand Thailand” which looks at how mismanagement and mistakes turned a high-growth democratic paradise into a violent mess. Kurlantzick’s point is that Thailand has gone from an economic powerhouse with high economic growth in the 80s and early 90s to the present situation. On the reasons why:

One misstep was a failure of long-term thinking. During the good years, neither Abhisit’s Democrat Party nor Thaksin’s Thai Rak Thai Party, which first took power in 2001, invested enough in overhauling an archaic education system, which emphasizes basic literacy and rote memorization. Taiwan, Singapore, China, and India invested in university education, English-language instruction, and higher-value skills, and as a result managed to build innovative companies with a global outlook, and sizable English-language outsourcing industries. But Thailand’s government and its major business groups remained wedded to lower-value manufacturing for foreign companies. Unlike China or Singapore, the government failed to create effective incentives to help Thai companies improve their workforces and expand globally. Large Thai conglomerates, historically protected by tight ties to government leaders, moved slowly to embrace real international competition, even as Thailand inked free-trade deals with China and other Southeast Asian states.

The failure was obvious. Thailand’s scores on the TOEFL exam, the test of English skills for students heading to university, now consistently rank among the lowest in Asia. No Thai-owned companies have emerged that compare with the Taiwanese computer giant Acer or the Indian IT giant Infosys. And as China gobbles up more and more low-end manufacturing, high-tech firms ignore Thailand… 

Meanwhile, Thai leaders chose not to preserve the core of its appeal to tourists. Neighboring Singapore enacted strict environmental-protection laws, and even in heavily industrialized South Korea, former Seoul mayor and current president Lee Myung-bak oversaw the replanting of millions of trees around the capital city and the cleanup of the metropolis’s major stream…. 
…
Thailand had seen many coups, but most had ended in compromise. Not this time. When a pro-Thaksin government was elected again, in 2007, anti-Thaksin yellow-shirt protesters shut down Bangkok; after Abhisit’s government replaced a pro-Thaksin government in 2008, the red shirts poured out into the streets in an attempt to force Abhisit to step down. The result of this incessant brinkmanship is a furious Thai population ready to explode at any change in the political status quo, making compromise much harder.

While Thai leaders were trying to centralize power in their own hands, their Asian rivals were moving the opposite way. In Indonesia, the government has devolved more authority from Jakarta, in order to tamp down local grievances. Even authoritarian China has granted greater powers to local officials. In Thailand, after the 2006 coup, leaders replaced the progressive 1997 Constitution with one that provided an amnesty for the coup leaders, made the Senate less democratic, and tried to quiet unrest by strengthening central authority in Bangkok. These decisions backfired, first by a widening of an already-spiraling insurgency in Muslim-dominated southern Thailand, and then in the red-shirt protest movement, both of which resent the growing power of Bangkok. Yet Abhisit continues to bulk up the capital, and now uses an emergency decree to restrict civil liberties and allow the security forces to crack down harshly on protest.

BP: Don’t have much time so BP’s argument will be quick. Kurlantzick’s strongest point is on a lack of educational reform. The education system supports the status quo because it encourages uniformity. There is an inequality of opportunities with schools in urban areas receiving more funding per student than schools in rural areas – see here and page 8 of this report. 

Thailand has used licenses to grant concessions to large businesses to get rich. There are huge barriers to entry in many sectors so those who are politically connected/can afford to pay bribes (yes, you can include a certain former Prime Minister here). To ensure their interests are protected, businessman either enter politics or make large donations.to politicians. Enforcement against larger politically influential businesses and individuals is rare – well except for those associated with Thaksin since 2006 although also to a lesser extent against anti-Thaksin businesses pre-2006. This is part of the double standards argument as when the law is enforced it can be quite harsh, but because it is done so quite arbitrarily and not against those in power so the laws are not changed. 

Kurlantzick doesn’t fully make the point and is that economic gains by the lower classes has not been reflected with the same political gains. The leader they elected, Thaksin, was overthrown through a coup and changes to the 2006 constitution with increased power being given to non-elected bodies has further weakened the power of elected politicians.