The law of gravity dictates that what goes up must come down. This is also true for an economy: When it has been expanding quickly, growth is bound to fall unless it is further supported by some gravitydefying force.
Thailand's gross domestic product (GDP) advanced 2.8% in the second quarter compared with the same quarter last year, slowing further from the 5.4%rate in the previous quarter. The closing figure for the final quarter last year was a much more impressive 19.1% rate,albeit from the flood-soaked base of late 2011. All in all, the latest official release suggests, as the Bank of Thailand put it, that "normalisation" of the economy to its potential level is taking place following a period of extraordinary growth.
On a quarterly basis, however, GDP has declined for two consecutive quarters.Therefore, we have entered a technical recession. This prompted many research houses to cut their growth projections for 2013, from around 5% or higher to below 4%. Such bad news also turned the stock market even more bearish,just as investors were dealing with the prospect of the US Federal Reserve turning off its money tap.
In our March column, after fourthquarter 2012 GDP data were released,we were still writing about Thailand's economy growing at one of the fastest paces in Asia, yet everything looks so gloomy now. What has gone so wrong with the Thai economy that could turn market sentiment and the economic outlook topsy-turvy?
Everything that has a beginning has an end: The government's first-car taxrebate programme arguably has been the strongest driver of the Thai economy,especially toward the end of last year.We saw exceptionally high figures from both the sales and production sides. It was so strong that Thailand jumped to ninth place among the world's car manufacturers from 15th in just one year. But the programme is now over.Annualised changes in monthly sales of vehicles peaked at 477% in November last year, but stood at -25% in July this year.
Nevertheless, once we remove vehicle expenditure fromGDP, the economy in the second quarter net of the part that involves vehicles actually expanded 1.2% quarter-on-quarter. This explains why people talk about a "technical recession" as opposed to the real one since it is simply because of the slowdown in car deliveries. The factor that once was the main growth engine has turned to be the main drag.
Now that we have that straightened out, we should be relieved, right? Wrong.What worries us more is the dissipating momentum of domestic consumption as a whole. The Private Consumption index (PCI) compiled by the central bank indicates a further consumption slowdown, contracting 0.7% year-onyear in July. Largely, this was due to the decline in purchases of cars and other durable goods, but the Bank of Thailand also cited mounting household debts that make Thai households more vulnerable and more cautious about their spending.
The public investment projects that were supposed to kick in during the second half of this year have now been delayed. In other words, the additional gravity-defying force that Thai economy needs is missing. Had these gone through as planned, our analysis suggests that they would have lifted GDP growth by 0.5% to 0.8% annually on average.
We have little hope for merchandise exports as the recovery in the United States and Europe is still fragile, while China's economic expansion has slowed markedly. Against the backdrop of Commerce Ministry's target of export growth between 7% and 7.5%, we believe that 2-3% is more plausible a second year of disappointing performance,especially with no major flood affecting capacity. As a result, we see Thailand's GDP growing by 3.8% this year, a downward revision from a 4.2% projection made earlier.
The Thai economy in 2013 seems to be having a hard time now finding sources of growth. But is it really all gloom and doom?
Perhaps we have paid too much attention to the disappearance of key economic drivers that we forgot to look at the bigger picture. In order to better understand the economy, we may need to take a step back.
All economies, and most economic variables, are subject to what economists call business cycles. Simply put, the business cycle involves upward and downward movements of GDP, and refers to the period of expansions and contractions through time.
Actual data seem to suggest that components of GDP such as consumption and investment, as well as sales and production figures, do go through periods of expansion, boom,recession and depression, in the same way the aggregate variables do. So where is our consumption currently?
Statisticians take this concept further and posit that any time-series data may be broken down into components that exhibit different oscillations with different interpretation. To be fair, they had invented tools to describe natural phenomena long before economists borrowed them to study the economy.
Technical jargon aside, in the table,we employed a tool to decompose private consumption expenditure in different cycles. Our decomposition simply yields short and long cycles, where the former span one to three years, while the latter may last up to 10 years.
Currently, both the short and long consumption cycles are heading south,and that's why private consumption seems to have lost momentum completely. The good news is that the short cycle is bottoming out, and so we could expect stronger consumption expenditure next year, although the longcycle growth will still remain in the vicinity of 3%.
Now let's look at the index of car sales, and number of foreign tourists.They are also experiencing short-cycle bumps, yet projecting healthy long-cycle growth. In fact, Thailand has received an extra push from foreign visitors which we can think of as another set of consumers since last year, and this thrust will persist a while longer.However, it doesn't mean that we should put all our resources into growing these two industries. History proves that a more resilient economy is a more diversified one look where Detroit is now.
To put it all together, despite our take that the technical recession in the second quarter is a bit overrated, we still worry about a further slowdown in the Thai economy this year. Our decomposition shows that the short-run boosts are no longer with us, while the long-run trend will command lower-than-average consumption growth in the coming years.
If we can weather this swing in the short-run cycle, the economy will probably look brighter once investment and exports start kicking in once again.We just hope that these come sooner rather than later. Fingers crossed.