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This thesis tried to unravel the causes of the technological underdevelopment of the Thai automobile industry by examining the institutions, the actors and their interaction. The principal characteristic of each actor was a product of where it came from, when it developed, and how it adapted to· historical events. Having only evolved slowly, these characteristics have conditioned the behaviour of the actors - the strategies of multinational corporations, the policies of the Thai government and the management structures of Thai firms - during the last 40 years of the 20th century. The minimal intervention of the Thai government helped promote the activities of multinational corporations, and they brought wide-ranging manufacturing know-how to Thailand. On the one hand, the relatively unfettered operation of multinational corporations was a driving force in the quantitative expansion of the automobile industry. On the other hand, this pattern of development was not conducive to the creation of a linkage between the technologically superior foreign [ums and local rums, and the promotion of learning activities in the latter. The situation was also aggravated by the management structure of local firms and their lack of effort to upgrade technology under the environment of the existence of the only weak market pressure. However, the technological underdevelopment cannot be simply attributed to some aspects of one or all of these actors. A case study of the Thai automobile industry suggested we could understand the root causes of the underdevelopment only by examining how the interaction of the actors set a certain path of technological development and how their behaviour was conditioned by their underlying characteristics.