Services exports: an evolution and evaluation of Thailand's services exports in the context of ASEAN-5

The services sector plays an important role in the economic transformation of a country. The growing tradability of services provides new challenges and opportunities to Thailand's services industries. Underpinning these challenges and opportunities is the competiveness and export structure of the services sector. Thailand's current services export structure is a manifest of its relative specialisation based upon given resources, activities, and strategies. To assess the competiveness of Thailand's services sector, the paper computes the Revealed Comparative Advantage (RCA) indices of Thailand's transport, travel, insurance and financial services. Specifically, the paper evaluates the shifting export competiveness of Thailand's services industries in the context of ASEAN-5. Among other factors, export competiveness in services depends upon the height of market access barriers, targeted under GATS and AFAS. The paper analyses Thailand's service liberalisation scorecard in terms of its committments to liberalise trade in services. Acknowledging the fact that the domestic, regional, and global trading environment is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for services firms to participate in international trade, the paper signifies the need to work on various industry, firm, and mode-specific factors that underpin competiveness of the Thai services industry.