Factors Affecting Thailand’s Sustainable Competitiveness

Abstract

This research was initiated with 3 objectives; 1) to study Thailand’s sustainable competitiveness, 2) to study factors affecting Thailand’s sustainable competitiveness, and 3) to find out the guideline for improvement of Thailand’s sustainable competitiveness. A mixed method of qualitative and quantitative approaches was designed for this research. In-depth interviews of 17 key informants were conducted for the qualitative research, in parallel to a survey research of 390 actual respondents. Another 22 experts participated the focus group discussion to sound their opinions on the research outcome and test the proposed policy models. Analytical induction was used as data analysis for data collected from the in-depth interviews and focus group discussion. For the survey research, descriptive statistics and inferential statistics including Pearson’s correlation and stepwise regression were used as data analyses. All these approaches coincide and confirm the following research results; 1) Thailand’s sustainable competitiveness is low due to lack of direct focus and measurement of economic values, environmental values and social values; 2) factors affecting Thailand’s sustainable competitiveness include (a) public policy implementation and its 3 subfactors including efficiency, effectiveness, and governance, (b) people management and its 4 subfactors including dedication and commitment, flexibility and agility, motivation, and communication, and (c) Iddhipādā 4 and its 4 subfactors including Chanda, Vīriya, Citta and Vīmaṁsā; and 3) the guideline for improvement of Thailand’s sustainable competitiveness is to fully integrate the 3 factors. With higher correlation coefficient and degrees of common effect from these 3 factors analyzed by the stepwise regression analysis, people management is the prime and integrative management tool to turn human quality developed by Iddhipādā 4 into productivity to drive for efficiency, effectiveness, and governance of the public policy implementation for the Thailand’s sustainable competitiveness.