The Importance of Food Industry to the Thai Economy: An Input-Output Perspective

The food industry has received discontinuous support from the government over the past decades. The contribution of the food industry in terms of increasing value added of agricultural products is often shed light, while studies on other aspects have been limited. This paper provides a sector comparison on the benefits of the food industry to the whole economy, using Thailand Input-Output tables of years 1980, 1990, and 2000. The empirical analyses concluded that among various leading industries, the food industry provided the strongest contributions to the Thai economy in terms of production inducement, employment generation, value added inducement and net foreign exchange earning although its export value was not the highest.