Role of government funding on the empowerment of the Royal Project Foundation: A general equilibrium approach

This study uses the latest SAM of Thailand in 2010 and the computable general equilibrium model (CGE) to quantify the economic impact of the RPF on the Thai economy. It will investigate the impacts of 15 scenarios which focus on the role of government funding in various situations. The analysis concludes that the RPF relies heavily on the increasing government funding. However, the funding seems not enough for many situations that negatively affect the economy of the RPF. The most severe case is the rising of both agricultural and food manufacturing costs. Between them, the rising agricultural cost is much more severe than the rising food manufacturing cost. The increasing labor cost is also critical to the economy of the RPF but its effect is less than those of the increasing agricultural and food manufacturing cost. Therefore, the government should not only focus on the direct assist to the RPF by its expansionary funding but also the indirect supports by monitoring and somehow controlling the costs in agricultural, food manufacturing sectors and labor cost to gradually increase rather than letting them increase sharply without any prior warning signal or even attempting to issue some policies to radically increase these costs.