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A Siamese tragedy : development & disintegration in modern Thailand / Walden Bello, Shea Cunningham and Li Kheng Poh.
- Format:
- Book
- Author/Creator:
- Bello, Walden F.
- Language:
- English
- Subjects (All):
- Environmental degradation--Thailand.
- Environmental degradation.
- Human rights.
- Thailand.
- Rural development--Thailand.
- Rural development.
- Human rights--Thailand.
- Thailand--Economic conditions.
- Economic conditions.
- Physical Description:
- xiv, 267 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm
- Place of Publication:
- Oakland, CA : Food First Books ; Bangkok : White Lotus ; London : Zed Books ; New York : Distributed by St. Martin's Press, 1998.
- Summary:
- This book argues that, even before the catastrophic collapse of 1997-98, the Thai economic miracle of the previous decade had feet of clay. The authors provide a comprehensive and cogent examination of the country's economic, environmental and human record. The book opens with the economic collapse that started in 1997. Is this a mere short-term blip in Thailand's race to build a modern industrial economy or is there a real prospect of the country being pushed back into Third World status? The authors explore the role of foreign investment and the consequences in terms of pollution and environmental destruction. They also present the human effects of the Thai model on workers, rural villagers, women and child labor. What emerges is a sustained critique of the vested interests, local and international, which have propelled the Thai people down this particular path, and a clear picture of how unsustainable it has been in terms of human exploitation, social disruption, ecological damage and economic fragility.
- Contents:
- 1 Introduction: Survey of an Economic Debacle 1
- A second Ayuthaya? 1
- High flyers laid low 2
- The effect on the real economy 3
- Twilight zone 4
- The culture of conspicuous consumption 5
- The Thai path to development 6
- Globalization of the Thai economy 7
- Creating the credit economy 7
- Royal doubts 8
- 2 Back to the Third World 10
- The political economy of NIChood 10
- Import substitution industrialization 10
- Export-oriented industrialization 12
- The private sector and the state 13
- The Japanese Tsunami 16
- Attracting portfolio investment and bank capital 18
- The deluge 20
- Financiers and realtors: Bonnie and Clyde in Bangkok 23
- The real estate bust 25
- Playing pretend 28
- Finance One: the crisis in microcosm 29
- Botched rescue 31
- The panic 32
- The financial crisis and the structural crisis 36
- 3 Thailand under the IMF 43
- A cosy relationship 43
- The Chaovalit government hesitates 46
- Chuan in the breach 47
- Critique of the stabilization programme 49
- Why engineer a recession? 49
- The 'moral hazard' issue 50
- Advancing the US agenda 50
- Reform or collapse? 52
- 4 The Failure of Industrial Deepening 55
- The education bottleneck 56
- The R&D fiasco 57
- Foreign investment and technology transfer: electronics 60
- Foreign investment and technology transfer: the car industry 61
- Thailand as Japan's technological dependency 63
- The financial crisis and foreign investment trends 69
- 5 Labour and Capital 74
- Emergence of the industrial working class 74
- Organizing labour 74
- Labour in the boom years 78
- Working women 81
- Hazards at work 83
- Squeezing labour for international competitiveness 86
- Child labour and migrant labour 88
- Losing strategy 90
- Economic collapse and class conflict 91
- 6 Bangkok: Vicissitudes of a Megalopolis 95
- Prime among primates 95
- Los Angelizing the 'city of the angels' 97
- Disneyland east: the mass transit chaos 99
- Citizens versus mass transit 101
- Land management: unleashing the private sector 105
- Klong Toey: rallying point for the urban poor 110
- 7 Pollution Haven 116
- Foreign investment and pollution 116
- Forms of pollution 118
- Crisis of regulation 126
- 8 The Erosion of Agriculture 133
- The two faces of the Thai countryside 133
- Subordinating the countryside to the city 135
- Commercialization and agrarian crisis up to the 1970s 138
- Social struggle, reform, and peasant defeat 147
- Containing the countryside after 1976 151
- Aborted 'NAICdom': Thai agriculture in the late 1980s 160
- Down the road of NIC agriculture? 167
- Thai agriculture in the eye of the storm 168
- 9 The Dynamics of Deforestation 175
- Deforesting the north 176
- The battle for the highlands 179
- Ecological crisis in the northeast 183
- Disaster in the south 187
- Government: part of the problem? 191
- Conflicting property systems 191
- Lack of political will 192
- The forest village and STK programmes 193
- Reforestation and resettlement 194
- The Thai Forestry Sector Master Plan 197
- The Forest Conservation Development Project 199
- The Community Forest Bill 201
- 10 Damming the Countryside 206
- EGAT begets resistance 206
- The problem with dams... 208
- The Pak Mun face-off 211
- Regionalization of Thailand's environmental crisis 214
- The financial crisis and the environment 217
- 11 The AIDS Crisis 221
- AIDS in Asia 223
- AIDS in Thailand 223
- Poverty, labour migration, and AIDS 224
- AIDS and the sex industry 226
- The economic impact of AIDS 234
- Battling AIDS: the scorecard 235
- 12 Conclusion: Revisioning the Future 243
- Emergence and dynamics of the NGO movement 243
- Critique of the system 245
- Fleshing out the alternative 247.
- Notes:
- Includes bibliographical references and index.
- ISBN:
- 1856496635
- 0935028749
- 1856496643
- OCLC:
- 39700794
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