Abstract:
The objective of this study is to figure out the external indebtedness capacity of Thailand under the creditworthiness of creditors. To sustain the creditworthiness constraint, net external debt to resource ratio should be constant. Resources is defined as a weighted average the value of exports and gross national output expressed in terms of foreign goods and the weights of them are unaffected by any change of the real exchange rate. To forecast net external debt accumulation to GNP ratio, there are some different rates of Thai output growth and Thai-exports markets output growth to estimate the current account deficit as a percentage of GNP. The result shows that the current account deficit as a percentage of GNP should be about 0.63 and 5.60 to sustain the 1997 creditworthiness under the Thai output growth rates between 2 and 7 and output growth rates of Thai-exports markets between 0 and 5. If Thai economy and the economies of Thai-exports markets grow as 4.50 and 3.33, respectively, the current account deficit to GNP ratio can be sustained as 3.68 in the 1997-external debt climate. To testify the net external debt accumulation between 1990 and 2001, this study found that the actual current account deficit to GNP ratio in 1996 to 1998 was more than the current account deficit to GNP ratio that generated from IMF rule. Moreover, the result of this study implies that the change in the output growth rate of Thai trading partners generates a window of the current account deficit to GNP ratio more than the change in the output growth rate of Thailand does. The cause behind this finding comes from the difference between income elasticity of exports and the weighted GNP in resources relative to the weighted exports in resources.