This indicates, again, the willingness of the government to undertake additional spending to support the recovery of the economy. On the monetary and financial side, the Bank of Thailand has ensured that monetary conditions remained sufficiently accommodative to support the recovery. We reduced our policy rate down to 0.5 percent which is as low as it has ever been in the history of the Bank of Thailand. In addition, financing conditions were also accommodative and supportive of economic recovery. For example, 10-year government bond yields in Thailand stand at only about 1.7 percent which is almost at a record low. Although we have not reached a zero or negative rate as we see in Japan, but for Thailand, it is a very low interest rate. For the overall liquidity, the loan to deposit ratios in the banks, as well as other measures of liquidity, indicate that overall liquidity is high. Nevertheless, the problem is that not all the liquidity is going where it needs to. In particular, we would like to see more liquidity being distributed to small and medium enterprises (SMEs). If we look at credit growth in Thailand and this is another illustration of my point that overall liquidity in Thailand remains adequate, credit growth to large corporates has been growing at over 10 percent a year. Even for the household sector, credit growth has also been growing at about 4 percent a year. However, the segment where credit growth has been shrinking is the SMEs.
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.