Capital outflow from the agricultural sector in Thailand

Certain Thai policies have facilitated economic development in Thailand: i) Raising agricultural productivity even during the early period of import substitution. ii) The relatively equal distribution of land. iii) Decentralized industrial growth. iv) The labor-intensive export orientation of both rural and urban industries. v) Generally open, merit-based access to education. The author studies capital flows between Thailand's agriculture and nonagriculture sectors, focusing especially on government policy for agriculture, which shapes government-based flows. He measures government- and market-based flows of both the agriculture sector and agricultural regions. Until the 1960s, Thailand's economy depended heavily on agriculture and most of the workforce was agricultural. Since the 1960s, Thailand has promoted industry. Between 1961 and 1991, agriculture continued to grow but because nonagriculture sectors grew even faster, agriculture's share of GDP fell from 37 percent to 13 percent. But agriculture still employs the majority of the labor force and still receives the third largest budget allocations (after education and national defense). Many believe that Thai development was made possible by capital accumulation based on an agricultural surplus. To some extent, the role of that surplus before 1975 should not be underestimated. But the government-based flow of capital from agriculture (measured as a percentage of GDP) was less than 6 percent in the 1960s and early 1970s (except for three years), and the market-based flow was only 3 percent of GDP in 1971, 2.5 percent in 1981, and 1.9 percent in 1991(measured as deposits minus commercial bank lending). So capital flows from agriculture have not been as large as is typically assumed. Since the 1970s, the government has adopted an export-oriented policy emphasizing labor-intensive light industry, and investments to promote labor-intensive industries in rural areas has created jobs for rural people. With a fair level of investment in rural areas, the environment in rural areas is not drastically worse than that in urban areas (unlike Latin American and African countries), and migration to urban areas has been limited in Thailand. The government-based inflow (government credit for, and investment in, agriculture) was significantly greater for large farms areas than for small-farm areas. This might be attributable less to the political power of large-farm owners than to industrialization in Thailand's central region.Environmental Economics&Policies,Agricultural Research,Agricultural Knowledge&Information Systems,Land Use and Policies,Economic Theory&Research,Agricultural Knowledge&Information Systems,Rural Land Policies for Poverty Reduction,Land Use and Policies,Economic Theory&Research,Agricultural Research

Renal Threshold for Glucose Re-Absorption in Patients with Latent Autoimmune Diabetes of Adults is Similar to That of Patients with Type 1 Diabetes Mellitus but Lower than That of Patients with Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus

N/

Standardization of metaiodobenzylguanidine heart to mediastinum ratio using a calibration phantom: effects of correction on normal databases and a multicentre study

Purpose: This study was performed to demonstrate that the results obtained with a calibration phantom could be used as a tool for standardizing measurement of heart to mediastinum (H/M) ratio in cardiac metaiodobenzylguanidine (MIBG) imaging. Methods: Images of the phantom containing 123I-MIBG were acquired on the cameras in 10 hospitals (11 camera types) to determine the relationship between H/M ratios using different collimators: low-energy (LE) and medium-energy (ME)/low-medium-energy (LME) collimators. The effect of standardization on the ME-comparable H/M ratio was examined in two settings: a Japanese standard MIBG database (n = 62) and multicentre studies (n = 49). In a multicentre study, probable Alzheimer\u27s disease (AD, n = 18) and probable dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB, n = 31) were studied and standardized by the calibration phantom method. Results: Linear regression equations between LE and ME collimators were obtained for the phantom study in all institutions. When the H/M ratio with an LE collimator was corrected based upon the calibration phantom, the corrected values were comparable to those obtained using ME collimators. The standard database also exhibited a normal distribution after standardization as determined by skewness and goodness-of-fit test. A mixture of the populations by LE and ME collimators showed significant separation of AD and DLB groups (F ratio = 24.9 for the late H/M), but the corrected values resulted in higher F ratios for both early and late H/M (F ratio = 34.9 for the late H/M). Conclusion: Standardization of H/M ratios by the heart-chest calibration phantom method is feasible among different collimator types. This method could be practically used for multicentre comparison of H/M ratios. © 2011 Springer-Verlag