Publisher's 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.
