The economy, technology, society and natural resources have been opened to the world while trans-border labour mobility has increased, he told a business seminar in the northeastern province of Nakhon Ratchasima.

The country should adopt His Majesty the King's sufficiency-economy prescription at the individual, business and national levels in order to cope  with the accelerating transformation, he said.

"This 10th national development plan is rather different from previous plans since we're not going to rely too much on GDP [gross-domestic-product] figures. Our emphasis is on gross domestic happiness," he said.

"Households, communities and the government will have to adhere to the initiatives on economic sufficiency so that our development model becomes more sustainable," he said, adding that it was about quality of growth rather than quantity.

Since the 1960s, Thailand has been laying out five-year national economic and social-development plans. In the late 1990's, NESDB started to shift its development focus to human resources and economic sufficiency.

However, the eighth plan for 1997-2001 was overshadowed by the International Monetary Fund's reform regimen for Thailand after it nearly went bust from the 1997 Asian crisis.

Afterwards the ninth plan, which ended last September, was adopted, but with little attention to economic sufficiency.