| Sumario: | This study will not attempt to analyze manpower and educational planning for the whole economy of Thailand. Rather, it will seek to unravel some issues regarding alternative approaches which might be used for manpower and educational planning in Thailand. Our pilot study will be focused on university educational planning in Thailand, with specific emphasis on how to allocate limited university resources to educate students in different fields so that resources will be utilized as efficiently as possible. Before discussing the alternatives, it is quite logical to go through a brief examination of strengths and weaknesses of the two typical approaches. However, after a thorough investigation of the two approaches, it was found that tremendous improvement could be gained through integrating them. The advantage is evident since the strengths of both approaches are retained and their weaknesses are reduced. Because of its integrated nature, the new approach is called the "integrated approach." The unique feature of this approach is the explicit inclusion of the demand for and supply of manpower in the model. The advantage of this model over one like Bowles's linear programming model is that ours does not require any restrictions on the demand function. After the model is constructed, it is quite natural to observe whether the model works empirically. Theoretically, the demand functions in this model must also reflect the marginal productivities of workers or, in this case, the earnings of university graduates. It is necessary, therefore, to test the wage-employment relationship in those markets to be assured that figures of earnings of graduates do in fact represent the graduates' marginal productivities. As far as the availability of the relevant set of reliable data in Thailand is concerned, markets for new college graduates are the only set of markets which can be tested objectively. Nevertheless, the results from the tests have helped shed some light on the...
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