A Siamese Tragedy: Development and Disintegration in Modern Thailand - Softcover

Bello, Walden; Cunningham, Shea; Poh, Li Keng

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1856496643 ISBN 13: 9781856496643

Publisher: Zed Books Ltd, 1998

Synopsis

Thailand has come to be known as the Fifth Tiger. Now with the economic collapse of 1997-98, this book poses the central question: how far is this a mere short-term blip or is there a real prospect of the country being pushed back into Third World status? The IMF's intervention with its irrelevant, indeed damaging, policy package 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.

About this title

About the Author

Walden Bello is Co-Director of Focus on the Global South, a policy research institute based in Bangkok, Thailand. Prior to that, he was Executive Director of the Institute for Food and Development Policy (Food First), in Oakland, California. Educated at Princeton University where he did his doctorate in Sociology in 1975, he has taught at the University of California, Berkeley where he was also a research associate with the Center for South East Asian Studies. He is the author of numerous books, including (with Shea Cunningham) Dark Victory: The United States, Structural Adjustment and Global Poverty (1994); People and Power in the Pacific: The Struggle for the Post-Cold War Order (1992); (co-authored with Stephanie Rosenfeld) Dragons in Distress: Asia's Miracle Economies in Crisis (1991); Brave New Third World? Strategies for Survival in the Global Economy (1990) and Development Debacle: The World Bank in the Philippines (1982). Shea Cunningham was educated at San Francisco State University and is now pursuing graduate studies at the University of California and Los Angeles (UCLA). She is a former research associate at Food First and Focus on the Global South, and coauthor (with Walden Bello) of Dark Victory: The United States, Structural Adjustment and Global Poverty (1994( Li Kheng Poh was educated at Cornell. She is currently a Research Associate at Focus on the Global South.

Edition details

• Publisher: Zed Books Ltd
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1856496643
• ISBN 13: 9781856496643
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288