At the same time, petroleum-related exports, which account for about a quarter of mainland exports, will likely decrease due to a decline in global offshore investment. It will likely take time for the effects of lower oil prices on the mainland economy to become fully visible. So far, unemployment has only shown a slight increase. A flexible labour market appears to be curbing the rise in unemployment. Employment growth has also remained firm, although an increasing mismatch between the number of unemployed and job vacancies points towards more slack in the labour market. In regions and sectors closely linked to the petroleum sector, unemployment has increased. BIS central bankers’ speeches  3  Weaker growth prospects may reduce the willingness of mainland firms to invest. On the other hand, improved competitiveness will provide a basis for expanding capacity in some sectors. In addition, housing investment is likely to support overall investment activity. House price inflation remains high. Growth in household consumption has been moderate in recent years and household saving has reached a high level, in spite of low interest rates. The pension reform and uncertainty surrounding economic developments have probably induced households to increase saving. Overall, we expect growth in private consumption to remain moderate ahead and the saving ratio to remain at a high level. Debt-to-income ratios for Norwegian households are high, reflecting a long period of rapidly rising house prices.
Thailand, like Japan, is a country that is aging very rapidly as our labor force would be shrinking within this decade. Given that we were to rely on existing workers including informal workers from other countries in the region, our growth rate would still certainly trend downward. Again, increasing availability and attractiveness of automation will help mitigate that weakness in the Thai economy. The second trend is digital and governance. Currently, for example, people use digital payment as a way to access government income support schemes is something that will help improve the transparency and effectiveness of the government schemes. The overall trend towards digital together with the trend towards increasing transparency will help us in this regard quite significantly. Page 8 of 11  The third area, digital again not just to help with transparency but to help with our long-standing problem of not being able to move up the value chain as well as increase the value-added of many economic activities. For example, what are the things that we think Thailand is good at? What immediately comes to mind? One would probably think of food and the trend now is that people are increasingly concern about health, wellness, and want to know where their food comes from, not just the food itself but all of things that went into their food. Digital technology with ability to improve traceability in a transparent, verifiable way allows us at least to have the potential to increase some value-added of our food products.