Thai sufficiency stance seen as a wise economic plan for growth
THAILAND'S sufficiency economy could help contribute to sustainable economic growth and development with the key concepts of moderation and reasonableness, said panellists at a Bangkok symposium.
Sustainable Development: Lessons Learned” was held at the Sasin Graduate Institute of Business Administration at Chulalongkorn University.
“A sufficiency economy has something to do with moderation, reasonableness and built-in resilience in our way of consumption,” said Poomjai Nacaskul, first senior vice president of Siam Commercial Bank.
Poomjai said moderation meant having a balanced way of consumption. Reasonableness, he added, was to realise the negative effect of excessive consumption.
By pursuing a sufficiency economy, consumers were protected and immunised from risks and temptations that might lead to over-consumption.
A business expert from France’s Grenoble Ecole de Management, Patrick O’Sullivan, said a sufficiency economy was the wisdom of moderation that helped Thailand survive economic crises.
“It offers a wise antidote of how an economy should work,” O’Sullivan remarked, adding that Western economies had a lot to learn from this concept.
An expert from the Thai Sustainable Development Foundation, Priyanut Dharmapiya, said integrating the concept into school curricula could help familiarise students with sustainable development at an early age, thus empowering them so they could make use of it effectively in the long run.
In related news, panellists at a forum on the implementation of the Unites Nations’ sustainable development goals placed great emphasis on the role of a public-private partnership in that process.
In light of the upcoming adoption of the sustainable development goals by the UN General Assembly in September, former Dutch prime minister Jan Peter Balkenede told the forum that 2015 should be considered a year of inspiration. “The implementation of the sustainable development goals is a matter of honesty [in which the public and private sectors should take this opportunity to refresh international commitments on this issue],” Balkenede said.
To enhance the implementation of the sustainable development goals, the former Dutch premier suggested the public and private sectors should regularly report the progress of the process and adopt a more transparent benchmark to achieve a better outcome on this issue.
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