Comparative Advantage of Thailand's Jewelry Market to ASEAN Jewelry Sector

Abstract

No doubt, jewelry and gold take a special place on the world market. The members of ASEAN are starting to be seen as an important competitor on the field of the world market as most of the member countries are in the top 20 of jewelry exporters. This paper gives a brief outlook on the jewelry sector in Thailand by examining comparative advantage within its ASEAN community members Myanmar, Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore for the past five years. In order to reach the goal of the research, revealed comparative advantage was implemented together with the effective rate of protection to see which country has an advantages toward the others and the reason why it is ranked on that place. As results have shown, Myanmar and Thailand are the only ones that have significant comparative advantage, however, Thailand does not have a very strong competitive advantage taking into consideration that the main component of jewelry-gold is not protected enough, thus, domestic market is weaker compare to the imports from other countries.