Unrest in Thailand's Muslim south has scared off tourists and cut rubber production, hurting the country's economic growth, Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra said yesterday.
Shortly after Thaksin vowed to restore peace in a month in the region where more than 200 people have been killed since January, a bomb exploded in front of a judge's house in Narathiwat province. No one was hurt.
"One factor that hurt our growth in the first quarter this year was the unrest in the south," Thaksin said in a weekly radio address.
The country's GDP for the first quarter of the year grew only 6.5 percent from the same period last year, compared with 7.8 percent annual growth in the previous quarter, the national planning agency said recently.
"The unrest has been reported worldwide, which has scared off many potential tourists," Thaksin said.
"Tourism didn't grow as much as we expected," he said. He did not give details.
Authorities have blamed Muslim militants for daily explosions and killings in recent months that have revived memories of a separatist insurgency that plagued the region in the 1970s and 1980s but almost petered out in the 1990s.
Despite sending in thousands of troops and promising millions of dollars in development aid, Thaksin's government has failed to stop the violence in the Malay-speaking region, which borders Muslim Malaysia.
About 2 million tourists visited Thailand in the quarter to March, down from 2.03 million in the same period a year ago, the tourism ministry said in April.
Tourism generates about 6 percent of GDP and had just rebounded from an outbreak of SARS in Asia last year that lopped 10 percent off last year's arrivals.
Australia and the US have advised their citizens against unnecessary travel to the three southernmost provinces -- Pattani, Narathiwat and Yala -- following clashes on April 28 in which security forces killed 108 militants.
The area is about 350km to the south of the resort island of Phuket.
Thaksin said the violence had prevented rubber workers from going out to tap rubber at night, hurting production.
"Despite good prices in the global markets, rubber volume from the three southern provinces is low because people are worried about their safety," Thaksin said.
"I've ordered troops to protect them to resume their normal rubber tapping soonest," he said.
Rubber industry officials say output is bound to be hit in the three provinces, which produce 200,000 tonnes of rubber a year, about a tenth of the country's production. Most is sold to Japan, China and the US.
The latest violence took place in Narathiwat town yesterday when a bomb made of ammonium nitrate was set off by a mobile phone signal near the home of a judge. It caused some minor damage but no injuries.
SECOND-RATE: Models distilled from US products do not perform the same as the original and undo measures that ensure the systems are neutral, the US’ cable said The US Department of State has ordered a global push to bring attention to what it said are widespread efforts by Chinese companies, including artificial intelligence (AI) start-up DeepSeek (深度求索), to steal intellectual property from US AI labs, according to a diplomatic cable. The cable, dated Friday and sent to diplomatic and consular posts around the world, instructs diplomatic staff to speak to their foreign counterparts about “concerns over adversaries’ extraction and distillation of US AI models.” Distillation is the process of training smaller AI models using output from larger, more expensive ones to lower the costs of training a powerful new
Singapore-based ride-hailing and delivery giant Grab Holdings’ planned acquisition of Foodpanda’s Taiwan operations has yet to enter the formal review stage, as regulators await supplementary documents, the Fair Trade Commission (FTC) said yesterday. Acting FTC Chairman Chen Chih-min (陳志民) told the legislature’s Economics Committee that although Grab submitted its application on March 27, the case has not been officially accepted because required materials remain incomplete. Once the filing is finalized, the FTC would launch a formal probe into the deal, focusing on issues such as cross-shareholding and potential restrictions on market competition, Chen told lawmakers. Grab last month announced that it would acquire
Shares of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) have repeatedly hit new highs, but an equity analyst said the stock’s valuation remains within a reasonable range and any pullback would likely be technical. The contract chipmaker’s historical price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio has ranged between 20 and 30, Cathay Futures Consultant Co (國泰證期) analyst Tsai Ming-han (蔡明翰) told Central News Agency. With market consensus projecting that TSMC would post earnings per share of about NT$100 (US$3.17) this year, supported by strong global demand for artificial intelligence (AI) applications, and the stock currently trading at a P/E ratio of below 25, Tsai said the valuation
The artificial intelligence (AI) boom has triggered a seismic reshuffling of global equity markets, with Taiwan and South Korea muscling past European nations one by one. With its stock market now valued at nearly US$4.3 trillion, Taiwan surpassed the UK, Europe’s biggest market, earlier this month, data compiled by Bloomberg showed. South Korea is about US$140 billion away from doing the same. The tech-heavy Asian markets have shot past Germany and France in the past seven months. The shift is largely down to massive gains in shares of three companies that provide essential hardware for AI: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電),
RSS