Second, a 2003 study of the investment situation by BOT staff (Mallikamas and others,
2003) included a set of aggregate growth accounts aimed at evaluating changes in the marginal
productivity of capital. The study is notable for its application of two alternative means of
estimating the labor share. Their first estimate is based on simply excluding income of the selfemployed
in calculating the factor income shares from the national accounts. The result is a
capital share that rises from about 30 percent in the early 1980s to 44 percent in the mid-1990s
before collapsing back to 30-35 percent in the aftermath of the 1997 crisis. This pattern of
change in the share is much different, for example, than reported in the TDRI study. The second
alternative is based on a method developed by Sarel (1997). He used cross-national data to
compute capital shares for sectors with similar capital intensities. These internationallydetermined
shares are then applied to the sector composition of individual countries. For
Thailand this yields a capital share that is basically constant over the period of 1980-2002 at 35
percent.