These determinants of income per capita are reported in international prices for 1975
(column 1) and 2003 (column 2).2
The average annual rate of change is shown in column (3).
The same concepts are reported again in columns 4-6, but relative to the corresponding value for
the United States. The progress that Thailand has made is particularly evident in the comparison to the United States: GDP per worker has increased from 10 percent of the U.S. level in 1975 to
17.5 percent in 2003. In 1975, Thailand’s population was also very young. Only about half of
the population was of labor force age (15+), compared to about 70 percent for the United States.
Today, the proportion of the population that is of working age is nearly identical to that of the
United States. The participation rate for those of labor force age is also very high in Thailand,
although it has not increased as much as in the United States. The high employment rate is
largely due to the very high employment of women. Finally, Thailand has largely financed it’s
growth out of it own resources with the consequence that Gross National Income (GNI) has
remained in the range of 98-99 percent of GDP. Income payments on FDI and foreign debt have
been largely offset by wages and remittances of overseas workers. The overall result is a growth
in income per capita that has been slightly faster than that of output per worker.
The level of GDP per worker and GNI per capita, relative to U.S. values, are also shown
in figure 4 to highlight the severity and importance of the 1997 crisis. By 1996, Thailand had
actually succeeded in more that doubling its 1975 relative income position; GNI per capital had
reached 21 percent of the U.S. level, but it fell back to 17 percent 1998. Since then, growth in
GDP per worker has only matched that of the United States, but there has been some recovery in
income per capita due to a rise in the employment to population rate.