These figures do not even count our steadily rising imports of industrial machinery and other capital-intensive goods from China.
At the same time there will be a rise in prices of capital- and skill-intensive goods and services which China needs to import.
Firms that produce petroleum-intensive goods and services may reduce their prices, which will cause consumers to spend more on these goods and spend less on other goods.
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They distrust Mr Thanong's projection of an export-led recovery, given that Thailand is in the throes of shifting from cheap-labour industries to manufacturing capital-intensive goods, such as cars and electronics.
Furthermore, oil-dependent governments, facing a population boom and realizing that they need to diversify their economy to create jobs and wealth, are subsidizing the industrial sector to manufacture plastics, chemicals and aluminum, all energy-intensive goods.
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It used to be thought that only rich countries had educated workforces able to produce skill-intensive goods, but poor countries have invested heavily in education in recent years, allowing them to start competing in more sophisticated markets.
This is the basis of the Balassa-Samuelson theory which holds that average prices will be higher in countries with higher productivity (ie, high GDP per head), because higher wages will push up prices in labour-intensive goods and services.
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China is already pushing down the prices of labour-intensive manufactured goods, thereby boosting the real incomes of consumers in developed countries.
This may be because services tend to be more labour-intensive than goods, and because wages are stickier (downwards, anyway) than other prices.
America's export boom is likely to be led by firms that are already global in scale and by sectors in which America has a clear competitive advantage: sophisticated, knowledge-intensive capital goods like microprocessors, and high-end services like engineering, oil-production services and even (witness KPF) architecture.
Within this decade, we will see 3D printers doing the small-scale production of previously labor-intensive crafts and goods.
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By the end of this decade, we will see 3D printers doing the small-scale production of previously labor-intensive crafts and goods.
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Previously limited to the labour-intensive manufacture of light-industrial goods such as toys, pens or shoes, private enterprises can now muster the wherewithal to invest in capital-intensive projects such as car factories and steel plants.
But he is also right in seeing that the old way of moving white goods was too labor-intensive to survive.
Plus, there is a lack of apprentices willing to learn the time-intensive trades, with one artisan bluntly admitting that there is no easy money in making handcrafted goods.
But he is also right in seeing that the old way of moving white goods, in which a floorwalker had to explain every icemaker and vegetable drawer, was too labor-intensive to survive.
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