Originally Posted by
Seekingasylum
Your wife seems as ill-informed as you are unbalanced, Battyboob, but I daresay she is viewing things through the prism of some awful village bothy.
Employment in the EEC corridor, around Chachoengsao, in the greater Bangkok industrial belt and within the metropolitan areas is booming with semi-trained factory floor workers now earning a wage of 15,000 baht monthly and with the increasingly available "OT", these rates increase to 18-20,000 baht monthly.
FDI is booming and more companies are relocating from their own countries to set up manufacturing centres in Thailand.
The only bleak spots are of course the dreary boonies but as in all industrial societies the migration from the rural areas to urban centres is inevitable with agriculture diminishing as a viable career path.
The baht is strong because the current account is burgeoning and the debt to GDP ratio is a mere 42%, levels which are unlikely to change.
And because the vast majority of Thai are unconcerned by the niceties of democratic governance it is difficult to envisage any threat to the continuing stability - crime is low level, opportunistic or the consequence of inherent Thai imbecility and there is no perception of criminal activity threatening the social fabric.
As a slightly more prosaic indicator, the higher end condos here in north Pattaya are seeing increasing numbers of long term lets to Koreans, Japs, indonesians working on long contracts at Laem Chabang and the booming Rayong district factory conurbations.
Essentially, only the idle or educationally subnormal could fail to find work now.
The problem is that in the provincial boondocks there is no investment because in truth there is no point to them, most of which merely service the needs of the subsistence farmer and a narrow middle class offering an administrative infrastructure funded by public expenditure.