The total flood damage to the country is estimated at 1.3 trillion baht, Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra said on Thursday, and promised to resurrect the economy with all urgency.
The Federation of Thai Industries (FTI) said damage to small and medium enterprises alone amounted to 800 billion baht.
Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra, in a speech on “Roles of the Public and Private Sectors in Maintaining National Security” given to students at the National Defence College of Thailand, said the flood damage is huge and had severely affected the production sector.
“The government will rapidly move to stimulate the economy in order to restore the confidence of investors and boost economic expansion,” she said.
Ms Yingluck said the government had set up two strategic committees - for rebuilding the country and future development, and for water resources management.
The government would do its best to enable factories to restart production lines as soon as possible.
It would also move to learn more about the new threats from natural disasters in order to timely and accurately forecast and warn people about the dangers, she added.
Operation plans for any emergency situation must be in place, said the prime minister.
In addition, the government will boost economy of all villages through its SML village fund, which would help strengthen the rural communities, she added.
The global situation had been rapidly changing and has negative impact on national security as a result. All sides must join forces in bringing about sustainable and stable peace to the country, said Ms Yingluck.
Sompong Tancharoenpol, vice chairman of the Federation of Thai Industries (FTI), said the flood damage to small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in eight provinces is estimated at more than 800 billion baht.
More than 10,000 small and medium level manufacturers in eight provinces were inundated, affecting over 660,000 workers, he added.
The FTI had proposed to the government measures to rehabilitate the flood affected SMEs -- setting up an industry rehabilitation fund, offering a debt moratorium for SMEs and using money from the Social Security Fund to pay compensation for workers who lose their jobs during the rehabilitation period, said Mr Sompong.
Yutthasak Supasorn, director of the SME Promotion Office, said SMEs' revenue in the fourth quarter of the year would be down on the previous quarter by 1.5 per cent, due to the floods.
He projected the gross domestic product of the SME sector to grow by between 1.8 and 2.0 per cent this year, substantially lower than the previous projection of 4-4.2 per cent.
Mr Yutthasak expected GDP growth of SMEs would be between 3.8 and 4.2 per cent next year.
He had proposed the government that it should provide low interest rate soft loans for the inundated SMEs and come up with additional measures to support and rehabilitate them.
He said in the first ten months of the year, 49,900 new SMEs had registered with his office, up 16 per cent from the same period last year, and 6,600 SMEs reported that they have closed down, an increase of 36 per cent.
The impact of the recent floods also affected confidence of consumers.
The consumer confidence index (CCI) on the overall economy in November went down to 61.0, from 62.8 reported in October, the Economic and Business Forecasting Centre said.
The CCI was the lowest for 122 months, since September 2001, according to the centre.
Consumers’ confidence on job opportunities for the month stood at 62.5, the lowest in 119 months, and on future income was 89.5, the lowest for 28 months, it said.
The negative factors that eroded consumers’ confidence included the devastating floods that inundated industrial estates, people's homes and office buildings, the lowering of growth projections for the year to 1.5 per cent by the National Economic and Social Development Board, rising living costs, the fragile global economy and higher pump prices for diesel.
The positive factors were the decision by the central bank’s monetary policy committee to cut the repurchase rate by 0.25 percentage points to 3.25 per cent, the weakening of the baht and that the drop in exports in October was only small, the centre said.
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