THE THAI GOVT WANTS TO END MASS TOURISM

18 December 2021

https://www.thaiexaminer.com/thai-news-foreigners/2021/12/17/thailand-again-signals-end-of-mass-tourism-thai-examiner/

When change is needed, this can sometimes come if a leadership sees the need to innovate and adapt and maybe it gets inspired; but often it requires a change of leadership. That is the beauty of democracy - the people can overthrow a tired old government, peacefully.

Instead of closing down a successful sector of the economy, mass tourism, as this article from The Thai Examiner suggests, the Thai govt could try first to create a new and promising sector or sectors.

For example, in 1979, Deng Xiaoping visited America to meet Pres. Clinton. He was the People's Republic of China chairman from December 1978 to November 1989. He had seen Japan, S Korea and Taiwan becoming immensely rich and wanted to know more. China was at that time following the Russian USSR ideology.

What he observed was that those three countries were making very high quality goods, at competitive prices, and the huge and wealthy American Middle class was buying them.

In 1980, China was awarded Most Favoured Nation status. A rare and extremely valuable honour.

Under Deng Xiaoping's leadership, China switched from the USSR model to the American, while remaining "Communist". ("Communist", in reality, means a one-party state that controls the economy, mostly through ownership, and the people, through a Ministry of Security, aka the secret police). China started doing the same thing - Deng completely re-oriented the economy from agriculture to production for export.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Now, of course, there is an even bigger and wealthier middle class. And it is not in America.

It's in China.

What does the Chinese middle class want? Well, Thailand could find out and get manufacturing.

Or it could stick with mass tourism. It's up to the PM.