Join the new world

"The main thing we need to focus on is bringing more companies into the mix and really openning up our markets"

Unfortunately, no. We don't have the labor pool to support more companies; more companies than we have workers for is one of the reasons our market is in the state it's in. More companies without more labor means more competition for what workers there are - IOW, driving up wages. This directly leads to higher prices, as labor prices increase. The other effect of more companies coming in is that it helps ensure what companies there are have difficulty maintaining optimal size... thus driving down productivity and again increasing the cost of labor per item produced.

At the moment, more companies are the last thing we should hope for in eThailand.

If you meant by opening our markets to allow for foreign companies to sell good here we have already gotten the ball moving on that one in the last session by lowering import taxes to 5%. Companies may not want to spend 20 gold to sell goods here for prices they may not be able to compete with.

We have fairly low prices on the items we do have in stock comparatively with other markets if you convert prices to gold.

Q2 gifts
eUSA - 6.79 - 0.098 gold
eThai - 16.98 - 0.070 gold

Q2 food
eUSA - 3.40 - 0.049 gold
eThai - 10.50 - 0.043 gold

Q1 Moving Tkt
eUSA - 19.95 - 0.28 gold
eThai - 47.25 - 0.19 gold

I think we are fairly lucky people aren't raising prices to stay in line with the gold. Also that people are not coming here buying up our cheap product.

If you compare to gold, I remember the days where Q1 food was .05 THB and the economy was doing fairly well, hell the Soviet Union before the idiots outvoted the CPSU and let the Romanians invaded had about .03 RUB Q1 food and about 1 RUB Q2 food, roughly.
So now we are at 5THB in an economy that couldn't support paper on it's broken toothpick support beams?
Wish we all had gold to spend, life would be so much easier.
LESSEN COMPANIES- We have TOO MANY.
This is when the entrepreneurship fails and companies need to shut down, but it wouldn't be fair if only certain people held all the money, so why not let people ran government companies do the work? Take the money in an SO, what is there you can pay workers very good amounts, while any left over you can either give back or help purchase goods (or lottery jackpots) or, you know, also stockpile some goods so that there is a supply and the prices can go even farther down for food.
Or is that too fair for some of you greedy business people?
Really, it's not all that hard of work if you actually care, instead of complain or try to tell us making more companies will help our economy by thinning out the workforce and destroying all hopes of ever making this god forsaken populace realize for the last few months what they are doing is not working, but hey, let eThailand strive for its well being.

ok all of you have fairly good points well all i know is the economy is broken and it needs fixing

No doubt we need to lose some companies. We haven't the workforce to support it. This is nothing new. It's been this way since I've been here.

I'm not sure if I interpreted you correctly but are you suggesting that all GMs cooperate and put their companies into a government run pool where they get to work and receive wages; or do you mean GMs all shut down or sell their companies to government and work for wages. I don't see the upside. Why would any GM agree to either of those? They have invested much of their hard earned money into their companies. I've used RL money to get gold to buy companies. Sorry to be blunt but I have no intentions of giving my companies up so people who haven't spent money on this game can profit equally to me.

I am not a believer in communism and socialism. It is against my principles. Good rewards for hard work. Not good rewards for someone else's hard work.

With that said I still do contribute back through gifts and food donations as well as housing help. I do believe in helping but I don't like being told how to spend my money.

Gentyle:

The problem is that your sensible sentiments are mirrored by every owner in eThailand. No one wants to be the one to give up THEIR hard work for the good of the labor market. This reluctance is exactly what led to our recent wage escalations; it was incredibly bad for the economy as a whole for the salaries to spiral upwards, but no one was willing cap their salaries, because it would mean they'd lose their employees and be forced out of business. Better to engage in the wage war as a combatant then surrender to the other GMs right out of the gate. And so it goes.

However, even if we did have half the companies in eThailand agree to close their doors until the labor market could support them... I'm not sure it would help. If we cut wages to a noticeable degree, we'd soon enough have foreign investors opening companies to replace the closed domestic ones, because the labor would be insanely cheap. These would be export-oriented businesses, and their owners would care not one jot about the effect their business practices had on eThailand.

Which is to say, there's no magic bullet. Well, maybe universal unwavering selfless solidarity across the entire labor pool (ha!), or a fairly substantial increase in the value of the Baht.

Even without a substantial increase in the baht we wouldn't be bad I don't think. If we could even get the Baht to stay at a certain rate we could just adjust prices of wages and goods to those of the top countries. Our Baht just goes up and down too much.

It is unfortunate that government cannot regulate how many businesses exist through a permitting process. Only allow a certain number of permits based on country size or leave it up to individual governments.

I understand why the GOs would be against this because it would be less gold spent. Also it is easily corruptible. Problems like this probably only exist in small countries anyhow.