During his five and a half years in power, virtually no attempt was made to evaluate whether any of Thaksin's projects served their intended purposes, or whether they were implemented in a cost-effective manner. The overthrow of Thaksin's government in a military coup last month led to a rethink of many of his extravagant projects.

The Bangkok Fashion City project was launched with much fanfare in July 2003, with a budget of Bt1.83 billion, while the private sector chipped in another Bt487 million. The aim was to make Thailand a centre of regional fashion by 2005 and a global fashion hub by 2012.

A working committee, comprised mostly of private sector representatives, was set up to devise ways to train 600 selected students and skilled workers in three key areas: fashion design, fashion management and production techniques. A learning and research centre was also set up to monitor fashion trends and the worldwide fashion industry to enable professionals and students to keep abreast of new developments as they happened.

According to Thaksin, Thailand could take a shortcut to become one of the leading trend-setters in the world of fashion through the careful nurturing of its longstanding cultural heritage and the availability of a vast pool of people with a high degree of craftsmanship. It followed that all it would take to propel Thailand onto the global fashion scene was to identify a new crop of talent and train them into front-rank designers who could somehow transform Bangkok from its lowly status as a garment manufacturing centre, known more for cheap labour than world-beating designs, into another Milan, Paris or New York.

If only it were as simple as one, two, three.

After a careful assessment of the Bangkok Fashion City project, the Surayud government announced that it would stop injecting public funds into the project for the fiscal year 2007 because there is still some unspent budget that can be used. The private sector, including the textile, garment, leather, footwear, gems and jewellery industries, will be asked to take over much of the responsibility, including funding and promotional activities, in the coming years.

But it would be wrong of the government to wash its hands of the Bangkok Fashion City project altogether. The future democratically elected government, rather than spending silly money on extravagant fashion shows, should find more cost-effective and innovative ways to support the upgrade of the country's textile, garment, leather, footwear, gems and jewellery industries with a view to adding more value to their products.

Developing new talent and instilling in them entrepreneurial skills will take time and effort. Specialised education, such as fashion-and-textile design schools to train budding talent in the necessary tricks of the trade, and materials science and technology institutes, should be supported jointly by the public and private sectors. This will ensure that the upgrade of relevant industries goes hand in hand with the development of a new generations of fashion designers.

It cannot be emphasised enough that the only way for Thailand - which is fast losing its competitive edge as a low-cost producer of textiles, garments, leather and footwear to lower-wage countries like China and Vietnam - to survive in the global economy is to move up the value chain. Failure by these industries, which together employ hundreds of thousands of people, to upgrade and add more value to their products would prove disastrous.

The Bangkok Fashion City deserves continued support from the future government. The way to do it is not to squander taxpayer money on costly, attention-grabbing events as Thaksin did, but rather to spend public funds wisely and in innovative ways.