Portal:Thailand/Intro
Kingdom of Thailand
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| ISO 3166 code | TH |
Thailand, officially the Kingdom of Thailand and historically known as Siam (the official name until 1939), is a country in Southeast Asia on the Indochinese Peninsula. With a population of 66 million, it spans 513,120 square kilometres (198,120 sq mi). Thailand is bordered to the northwest by Myanmar, to the northeast and east by Laos, to the southeast by Cambodia, to the south by the Gulf of Thailand and Malaysia, and to the southwest by the Andaman Sea; it also shares maritime borders with Vietnam to the southeast and Indonesia and India to the southwest. Bangkok is the state capital and largest city.
Apart from a brief period of parliamentary democracy in the mid-1970s and 1990s, Thailand has periodically alternated between democracy and military rule. Since the 2000s, the country has been caught in continual bitter political conflict between supporters and opponents of twice-elected Prime Minister of Thailand Thaksin Shinawatra, which resulted in two coups (in 2006 and 2014), along with the establishment of its current constitution, a nominally democratic government after the 2019 Thai general election, and large pro-democracy protests in 2020–2021, which included unprecedented demands to reform the monarchy. Since 2019, it has been nominally a parliamentary constitutional monarchy; in practice, however, structural advantages in the constitution have ensured the military's continued influence in politics.
Thailand is a middle power in global affairs and a founding member of ASEAN, and it ranks very high in the Human Development Index. It has the second-largest economy in Southeast Asia and the 23rd-largest in the world by PPP, and it ranks 91st by nominal GDP per capita. Thailand is classified as a newly industrialised economy, with manufacturing, agriculture, and tourism as leading sectors. (Full article...)