Turning back to Thailand, the industrial policy which aimed at emulating the success
of industrial countries has been less than successful. What makes the resource curse thesis
relevant is abundance of land. To a certain extent in which one can learn from David
Richard’s classical example in the 18th century to some extent which resource wealth (fertile
land) often resulted in rent-seeking activities as the vested-interest (landlord) tried to capture a
share of the resource made available by god. In the Thai context, it is linked to logging and
cash crops which are thought to have resulted in environmental problems and diseconomies to
traditional agriculture. The ease of generating exports from natural resources, which resulted
in logging and extensive cultivation, partly reduced the drive of the Thai government to
develop labour-intensive and knowledge-intensive manufactured exports from the 1950s to
the 1980s. However, it may be too simple to impark on the stages of economic development
in developing countries by using only resource endowment as a prerequisite. This thesis is
old and interesting, but it is certainly not sufficient to understand the whole story.