Prema-chandra Athukorala opened the discussion by noting that the findings reported in the second part of the paper on the impact of the U.S.–China trade war on the Thai economy is not consistent with the comprehensive background discussion in the first part on Thailand's trade patterns. The background discussion gives the impression that, over the years, the economy has become increasingly resilient to vagaries of the global economy. Athukorala argued that the standard trade data used in the discussion could have camouflaged the Thai economy's dependence on the global economy. Shigeyuki Abe agreed with Athukorala's comments and suggested making a distinction between trade in primary products and manufactured goods in the analysis, and preferably disaggregate the latter further into trade with global production networks (vertical trade) and in the standard manufactured goods (horizontal trade).
Wing Thye Woo urged the author to reduce the large number of figures and tables in...