Generally, systems are working better and the economy is getting bigger and bigger and more and more sophisticated; doing exemptions on a project basis, except in very rare cases, will soon hold us back. The new government should take that last hurdle and make the general system acceptable, even if minimally by lowering taxes and making improvement in civil service performance, probably by making the civil service remunerated by output and productivity rather than the tenure system as at present. That leads to my comment on the long term initiatives that the government might carry out that would help in the long run, which I think is the main strategy for real recovery to take place. Without good long run prospects, there isn’t much hope to do well in the present. The government will have to be moved more on to the private sector footing. This doesn’t mean just selling state enterprises and such things. But it does mean that the government units that are retained would have to work for incentives in terms of output and cost reduction and have to, in general, compete with the private sector for government budget. BIS Review 108/2000  4  Generally, the private sector is not necessarily more efficient than the government. The key is that those that are not don’t survive and better ones expand. This doesn’t happen in the government because those that are inefficient just ask for some more budget, and this is forcibly collected.
M R Chatu Mongol Sonakul: Some ideas for the new government in Thailand  Statement by Mr M R Chatu Mongol Sonakul, Governor of the Bank of Thailand, at the British Chamber of Commerce, Bangkok, on 23 November 2000. *  *  *  Chairman of the British Chamber of Commerce and all the chambers here today, distinguished guests, and ladies and gentlemen. Good afternoon. Let me begin by saying that it behoves me, and I have to use that word as a career civil servant who has taken his duty righteously for the last 35 years, not to comment on the work of the present government especially during an election period. In any case what they have done is fast becoming history and we have to take it as facts. A datum from which we will have to operate. In my career, I have been unenthusiastic in commenting about history, and only study it with a view to creating the future rather than commenting on it. If I wanted to comment on history, I guess I would have continued my dual career as a university lecturer which ended abruptly after the first year of my working life, since I found the responsibility of turning up regularly on time every week for anything quite unbearable as well as preferring to be on the implementation side rather than a commentator or analyst.