Thai industrial policy: How irrelevant was it to export success?

The neo‐liberal interpretation of the Thai state suggests that industrial policy was incoherent, subject to rent seeking and irrelevant to Thai development success. A more nuanced micro‐historical analysis of the state's interventions demonstrates that this over‐simplification misses important examples of effective selective interventions during first stage import‐substitution industrialization in the 1960s, as well as in second stage ISI in the 1970s. In the 1980s there was a systematic turning of the entire industrial policy machinery to promote manufactured exports. Without these selective interventions there is reason to doubt whether Thailand would be where it is today—a next tier NIE.