Somkiat Tangkitvanich, Thailand Development Research Institute: This concise paper provides a critical analysis of the relationships among commodity price cycles, agricultural subsidies, and the “agricultural trap” in the case of Thailand. It is an interesting paper that addresses important problems in Thailand and many other countries.
Without economic transformation and the escape from the “agriculture trap,” Thailand cannot become a high-income country, as its agriculture sector has low productivity. From this perspective, I would like to discuss a few issues and offer some recommendations for future improvement of the paper.
First, the author discusses the commodity price cycle in Thailand. The combined data for rice and rubber is often used to make general point of the Thai agricultural sector. This can be misleading as the two commodities tend to have different price dynamics because of different supply and demand conditions. In fact, the author should distinguish two types of agricultural...