One Village One Product (OVOP) in Japan to One Tambon One Product (OTOP) in Thailand: Lessons for Grass Root Development in Developing Countries

Following the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, Thailand’s economy which did rely on external capital and resources suffered from an imbalanced economic growth. As a solution to the economic restructuring process, endogenous development concept proved to be an alternative development paradigm which prioritizes the community development, human empowerment in the transformation of local resources. Accordingly, One Tambon One Product (OTOP) was designed to unlock grass-root potentials by generating income through developing local products in a national, regional, and global scale. This initiative was first developed under the name of One Village One Product (OVOP) by local people in the poorest Oita Prefecture, Japan in 1961. The aim of the paper is to compare two development models of OVOP and OTOP. The comparative study draws useful lessons from the experience of OTOP for future applications of the OVOP model in developing economies. The paper finds that there are inevitable differences in terms of administration, finance management, human resource management, and marketing promotion management between bottom-up OVOP in Japan and top-down OTOP because of social diversity, political culture, and economic capability in Thailand. The paper contributes to provide a comparative study into models of sustainable development in the context of increasing gap between the urban and rural in globalization.