Moreover, one finds historical evidence which suggests that new technologies borrowed from the West have been of labour-augmenting varieties and that this was true in both manufacturing and agriculture (Odaka 1989). Until such time comes as the urban industrial sector is expanded to a sufficiently high scale and efficiency so that the on-farm, non-agricultural production activities are defeated and disappear, and hence their employment absorption capabilities disappear, the economy abounds with ample supplies of labour, although the latter do not make their existence felt in the market by way of (for instance) rising unemployment. Under such circumstances, it may be possible that gradual increases in real per capita household income have coexisted with the stagnancy in real earnings of common wage labour.
With the above considerations in mind, the recent findings from the Thai labour market seem quite striking. First, from an examination of the labour force survey in post-WWII, one may conclude that the Thai notion of the "unemployment" could very well be multiple, and is possibly divergent from that of the Western usage. Second, assuming for the moment that the basic statistical survey was consistently made with reasonable accuracy, one observes a drastic upward movement in the unemployment rate after 1980 (cited by Suehiro, pp. 72-73; see Figure 5)(5). This phenomenal increase may have been caused by a structural transformation which took place in the Thai society in the 1970s, and that therefore redundant labour resources could no longer be contained in "disguised" fashion in the 1980s and onward. The phenomenon may partly be ascribable to the very rapid urbanisation of the economy, which has attracted swarms of job seekers into the urban areas (especially the Bangkok region). In any case, the emergence of such a substantial size of visible unemployment is quite a contrasting feature as compared with that of (say) Japanese industrialisation even up to the 1990s. This of course leads one to the question: why the difference, if any?
Real Wages
What was the general trend of real wages during the process of industrialisation? It is by now common understanding that it did go up during the British Industrial Revolution, as suggested many years ago by Ashton (1949),
