The Development of the ICT Cluster in Thailand

In August 2011, Thailand’s newly elected f irst female Prime Minister, Yingluck Shinawatra, announced her new government’s intention to pursue a new economic vision – one which called for a shift in focus from the traditional labor-intensive and commodity agricultural industries to more hi-technology-based competition. As she articulated this new vision, she was very much aware that not only was Thailand ranked 38 th (out of 134 countries) in the global competitiveness report conducted by the World Economic Forum, it also was ranked well below the world average on all of the factors related to technology, despite the fact that information technology and telecommunications had been a major factor driving the competitiveness of the country. More specif ically, as the Prime Minister looked more deeply into the matter, she found that one of the major problems for Thailand concerned the “pillar of technological readiness” – a measured used by the World Economic Forum to assess a nation’s capacity to utilize information and communication technologies. Thailand was ranked 86 th in number of Internet users, 64 th in availability of the latest technologies, 66 th in f irm-level technological absorption, 88 th in broadband Internet subscriptions, and 75 th in Internet bandwidth.