The Development of An Integrated Decision Model for Public Investment Projects in Thailand

Research and empirical evidence show that public investments, particularly in developing countries, often struggle or fail to satisfy their objectives and to response to the needs of local community. A main reason for that failure is the way how the decision-making process is carried out to select public investment projects. Despite the comprehensive discipline of decision-making, the current procedure in practice remains lacking strong foundation in its approach. In this research, the current state of public investment decision was investigated in Thailand as a representative case of public investment in developing countries. The analysis shows that the project evaluation and selection procedure in Thailand is unstructured and opaque. Moreover the decisions are mostly made based on a one-sided economic basis and hence neglect other important objectives that public projects supposed to meet.
This research proposes an integrated decision model (IDM) for evaluating and selecting public investment projects which addresses those shortcomings and consequently improves the process. The IDM integrates various evaluation and decision-making approaches, suitable for addressing not only economic, but also social, environmental and project support attributes, into one decision model. The IDM and its methodology is designed to be applied to any type of projects and organisations. With this function, two existing investment projects in Thailand have been applied through the entire methodology to test the adaptability and flexibility. The final results of the model have been reviewed by using sensitivity analysis to test the robustness of the selected choice. Moreover opinions from relevant experts in various fields and organisations were collected for further implementation.