Trade Policy and the Structure of Incentives in Thai Agriculture

As Thailand has industrialized, successive Thai governments have become increasingly interested in assisting agricultural producers and processors. But the export orientation of Thai agriculture has limited the scope for protection policy as a means of influencing domestic commodity prices. This paper uses comparisons between the prices of agricultural commodities in domestic and international markets as a means of studying the magnitudes of these interventions. Thailand is unusual in that except for the cases documented in this paper, assistance to rural people has primarily taken the form of direct transfers and subsidized loans, rather than interventions in agricultural commodity markets.