This is because traceability in our food products allows customers to realize the added values; whether they are transgenic or organic. This is one of the examples that the presence of the digital technology gives us the potential to move up the value chain in terms of food, which will provide large benefits in terms of employment and income due to Thailand’s high employment exposure in the agricultural and related sectors. Apart from food, tourism is another sector that would benefit from digital technologies. Currently, most of our tourism would stay for a short period of time and hence do not spend much. However, the digital technology’s trend towards work-from-anywhere provides the opportunity for us to attract different types of tourists who come, work, and stay for a long time. They are able to work from anywhere using working-from-anywhere technology which provides significantly higher value-added for the tourism sector. Because of that, one area that needs the improvement immediately is our visas and other regulations which are preventing us to realize possibilities from increasing values that we get from foreigners and foreign workers. Another area that people talk about is medical tourism. With the help from telemedicine technology, patients will able to come here because the technology allows them to talk to their doctor back in their home country while the actual medical treatments are provided by the doctor here in Thailand.
This is again to help address the problems that SMEs have, not just during this COVID-19 period, but also to help them restructure their businesses post-COVID. Those are some examples of how we are ending up where we are today which is largely due to measures undertaken by the government to support the recovery as well as cushion the impact from the COVID-19. I would like to turn now for the second part of my talk today which is on what lies ahead given that the recovery is likely to take some time. Again, the contraction from the COVID-19 last year was 6 percent and we expect the economy to grow 3 percent this year. For the next year, we are looking at a GDP growth of about 4.7 percent. Therefore, we are expecting the economy to come back to the pre-COVID level at least in terms of the headline GDP sometime around the third quarter of next year. However, given the uneven nature of the recovery, it does not mean that everything would go back to what it was like before. Recovery in the service sectors will lag quite significantly; notably, sectors related to tourism where the current forecast foresees a period of almost 4-5 years until we are likely to see tourism come back to the pre-COVID level.