Please, take a look around you… I can assure you that there is more than one John Global in this room… I suggest that after leaving the room each one of us should take a moment to think what you yourself, as an individual, can do to start preparing today for a meeting with John Global in 20 years. And what can each of us individually do to make us share a vision so that we can become citizens of the world and master the fine art of capturing the benefits brought by the homo sapiens globalus society. Thank you very much for your kind attention and I announce the topic open for discussion. 2  Methods employed in European Commission’s survey to assess the services provided involve defining a five-stage framework to determine the level of services provided. STAGE 0 – Total absence of any publicly accessible website or lack of possibility to qualify the existing website to any of levels 1 to 4 (0% – 24% in the figure). STAGE 1 – INFORMATION – The information necessary to start the procedure to obtain this public service is available on-line (25% – 49% in the figure). STAGE 2 – ONE-WAY INTERACTION – The publicly accessible website offers the possibility to obtain in a non-electronic way (by downloading forms) the paper form to start the procedure to obtain this service (50% – 74% in the figure).
The share of the population that have received two doses of vaccines in Thailand currently stands at about seven percent, which lags behind other countries in the region including Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Therefore, given that Thailand has been hit severely by the third wave of the outbreak with subsequent lockdown and the likelihood in achieving a larger share of vaccinated population that will take some time, this indicates that the recovery is likely to be slow going forward. Second, Thailand’s economic recovery is likely to be highly uneven or so-called “K-shaped recovery”. Our export sectors have recovered back to where they were prior to the crisis and are producing and exporting at levels higher than the pre-crisis levels. However, other sectors, notably the services and tourism-related sectors, have been recovering more slowly. In particular, hotels and restaurants are lagging significantly and experience a great Page 1 of 9  degree of hardship. The reason why this has hit the economy particularly hard is that tourism, aside from accounting a large share of GDP, also accounts an even larger share of employment. Tourism, both directly and indirectly, accounts around 20 percent of total employment in Thailand. Hence, employment and income were severely hit as a result of COVID-19, which will be another factor that will characterize both the slower and the uneven nature of the recovery going forward. While we have been hit hard, the economy has proven to be resilient.