A Siamese Tragedy: Development and Disintegration in Modern Thailand

Thailand has come to be known as the Fifth Tiger. With the Asian economic collapse of 1997-1998, this book poses the central question: Is this merely a short term crisis or is there a real prospect of Thailand being pushed back into Third World status? The International Monetary Fund has intervened with an irrelevant, indeed damaging policy package that promises to determine the outcome.
A Siamese Tragedy argues that, even before the collapse, the Thai economy had feet of clay. Walden Bello and his co-authors show how vested interests, local and international, propelled the Thai people down a particular path which is unsustainable in terms of human exploitation, social disruption, ecological damage and economic fragility. Thailand, like rest of the world, needs to rethink the fundamentals of its economic model.

Walden Bello is professor of sociology and public administration at the University of the Philippines and co-director of Focus on the Global South, a policy research institute based in Bangkok, Thailand.