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Thailand
Index
The Area Handbook for Thailand, first published in
1971, was revised in 1981 as Thailand: A Country Study.
This volume, a revision of the 1981 edition, recounts
developments in Thailand during the 1980s, a period of relative
political stability and respectable economic growth. Recently
Thailand's attention has focused increasingly on regional
concerns as, in concert with other members of the Association of
Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), it has attempted to deal with
the problem of the Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia.
Like its predecessors, this study is an attempt to present an
objective and concise account of the dominant social, economic,
political, and national security concerns of contemporary
Thailand, as well as to provide a historical framework for this
overview. The 1981 edition, which this volume replaces, was
prepared by a team composed of Robert Rinehart, Irving Kaplan,
Donald P. Whitaker, Rinn-Sup Shinn, and Harold D. Nelson and led
by Frederica M. Bunge.
The current Thailand: A Country Study results from the
combined efforts of a multidisciplinary team. The authors
obtained information from a variety of sources, including
scholarly studies, official reports of government and
international organizations, and foreign and domestic newspapers
and periodicals. Brief commentary on some of the more useful and
readily accessible English-language sources appears at the end of
each chapter. Full references to these and other sources used by
the authors are listed in the Bibliography.
The authors have tried to limit the use of foreign and
technical terms, which are defined when they first appear in the
study. Readers are also referred to the Glossary at the back of
the book. In general, Thai personal names conform to the system
of romanization followed by the Library of Congress. Certain
exceptions have been made, including names of the monarchs of the
Chakkri Dynasty (see
table 2, Appendix) and those of certain
other persons more familiar to Western readers in variant forms.
Some religious and social terms are given in Thai; others are in
Sanskrit, following usage in Webster's Third New International
Dictionary (unabridged edition), or in Pali, the language of
Theravada Buddhist scriptures. Contemporary place-names used in
this study are those approved by the United States Board on
Geographic Names. All measurements are given in the metric system
(see
table 1, Appendix).
Data as of September 1987
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