the Government of India, the Asian Development Bank,Manila, and the Global Industrial and Social ProgressResearch Institute, Japan, all of which suggests that thismight be an authoritative and leading edge source on theregion.

The book falls naturally into three parts, all to servethe ubiquitous aim to facilitate trade and commerce inthe targeted area. The ®rst part consists of themepapers on oil, natural gas, coal power, renewableenergy, ef®ciency, technology, ®nance, internationalcooperation, and information exchange. The secondpart contains a disproportionate midget six pages, butits signi®cance is that it represents a `common paperfor central Asia', based on the conference writingworkshop, and with representatives from ministriesand energy institutes from Kazakhstan, Turkmenistanand Uzbekistan. Together with the other independentstates of Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, which were createdat the end of 1991 following the dissolution of the SovietUnion, the combined population is more than 50 millionwith a land area of more than four million square kilo-meters. This set of notes of discussion varies between thevague and the speci®c, and sits uneasily between theother two parts. Why not include it in the ®rst part?

The ®nal section contains country papers from China,India, Iran, Japan, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Korea, Sri Lanka,Tajikistan, Thailand, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. It isunclear why the contributions are present from countriesoutside the region on which the book is supposed to befocused. They simply discuss their own country speci®csituation with no reference whatsoever to the CentralAsian and Caucasus states. They do not even discuss theissue of cooperation, which would have included a degreeof legitimisation for inclusion. Two thirds of the countrypapers, therefore, have no rightful place in this publica-tion, which is about one third of the total book. By allmeans produce yet another duplicative book of descrip-tive material, widely available elsewhere, but do not clog

up and weaken the purpose and vision of the presentpublication. The sections that are appropriate to the themeof the book are useful and informative, and provideindicators for cooperation.

If the reader is happy with the opportunity to possessthe disparate conference papers, with extremely lighteditorial intervention, which consists of a mere four pagesequally divided between the preface and introduction,one page of which reproduces some brief macro-economicstatistics from the World Bank, then he or she will becontent. However, one might have expected something byway of summary, conclusion or even recommendation forfuture action, instead of the book coming to an abrupt endfortuitously with the treatment of Uzbekistan. The meagremiddle six pages is insuf®cient to serve such a purpose.An index would also have been reader friendly, and agreat help in pursuing themes in this inchoate area.

The impression is of an editor who has disadvantagedthe use and impact of the book in the interests of rapidand easy publication. No doubt the book is easier to carrythan the original conference papers, but other than thisthere is little by way of added value. In the midst of theredundant and irrelevant material there is value to beextracted. Although this is doubtless for the present thekey text, it is a pity that it is not optimal, and we await afuture event or conference to result in a superior, morefocused and analytical product, which probes critically,rather than simply being in the hands of conference pre-senters with little or no cross-triangulation of data. We aretold that there are internal inconsistencies of data withinthe text, but in keeping with the phantom-like editor, nodetail is supplied.

Professor Gerald Vinten82 Speed House, Barbican

London EC2Y 8AU, UK

UNEVEN DEVELOPMENT IN THAILAND by MichaelJ.G. Parnwell, (ed.), 1996, Ashgate Publishing Company,Avebury, 345 pp. hardback £45.00, ISBN 1 85972 085 4

During the 1980s many East Asian and Southeast Asianeconomies were growing at a rate three times faster thanLatin American, South Asian and OECD countries, and®ve times as fast as sub-Saharan Africa. With their shareof manufacturing export shooting from 9% in 1965 to 21%in 1990, development literature talked not only of the`Rise of Asia' or the `Paci®c Shift' but of the realisation ofan `East Asian Miracle' or of the `Paci®c Century' (Ase-niero, 1996: 172). Thailand, dubbed as high-¯ying `next-NIC' with an average of 9% growth in its economybetween 1986±1995 (The Courier Mail, 2 November 1996:73), has similarly been seen as a shining example of eco-nomic triumph.

Such statistics for some, however, are deceptive. Parn-well suggests that behind the facade of Thailand's eco-nomic miracle lies a fundamental problem of unevendevelopment. This unevenness is not simply the

straightforward manifestation of unequal access to nat-ural, social, political and economic sources among variousgroups in different regions of the country. More impor-tantly, it is the result of the implementation of interventionstrategies, private and public, with no countervailingtendency towards equalisation. With this in mind, Parn-well asks his contributors to address the central question,`who has bene®ted from recent processes of economic,social and political transformation in Thailand'. Inanswering this question, four areas are examined: Thai-land's macro political economy, industrialisation, tourismand agricultural development.

On the political economical level, Dixon argues thatpolicies of economic liberalisation and deregulationinsisted upon by the World Bank and IMF as part of therequirement for structural adjustment, have contributedmuch to the economic boom of Thailand's economy, theyhave also simultaneously weakened the government'sautonomy to control the process of Thailand's socialtransformation. Maldevelopment occurs as a con-sequence, and Bell purports that the resulting social and

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regional inequality is best exempli®ed by the displace-ment of farmers through uncontrolled land speculation,the commercialisation of hill-tribes, intensi®cation ofprostitution, dominance of business in politics, and con-tinual degradation of the environment. Although Schmidtacknowledges that the alliance between the bureaucratsfrom the line-ministries and local businesses has hadsome success in avoiding the worst trappings of read-justment, he also sees clearly that the `business as van-guard' approach has little interest in bringing democracy,participation or state guided distribution of welfare to theworkers in both urban and rural areas.

On the industrialisation front, Simon con®rms thatwhilst Thailand's industrialisation and manufacturingindustries have been successful in diversifying their sec-tors and export markers, such material progress has out-paced public institutional improvements. For examplesocial security has been slow in its emergence, whilstprivate health care, insurance and education is growingrapidly. Walton is similarly critical in his assessment of thegovernment's new approach to regional developmentthrough the decentralisation of industries to the North-East. He claims that whilst there have been some suc-cessful government sponsored schemes to encouragefarmers in the North-East to produce higher-valued pro-ducts such as cashew nuts, or other similar food proces-sing ventures, some farmers involved in silk work andcattle rearing have ended up heavily in debt. Similarly, ifthe government continues to ignore rural development,inequality within the region itself will no doubt be exa-cerbated.

Arghiros and Wongsekiarttirat's study in Banglen, oneof the 16 districts in Ayutthaya province in CentralThailand, observe that the emergence of the brick indus-try has not only caused a rapid and marked class differ-entiation between the rich and the poor in the district, but,more disturbingly, that the new economic elite, over-whelmingly owners of brickyards, are able to insertthemselves into positions of local authority as village andsub-district headmen. Lefferts is similarly concerned withthe impact of industrialisation on textile weaving in ruralvillages and the loss of skills, recognitions and meaningamong women weavers.

In looking at tourism, Williamson and Hirsch areequally critical of its bene®ts. They ®nd that the positionof many locals in Samui have been made worse throughin¯ation of food and land prices, and by being displacedby resort development and losing access to publicresources such as beach space, ®shing sites, water, forestsand food resources. Some have surrendered by leaving. Innorthern Thailand, Dearden observes that althoughtourism has generated economic bene®ts, the hill tribesstill bear most of the negative sociocultural impacts. In avillage in Chiang Rai, Toyota also reveals that touristshave dominated the projection and representation of thenative culture, leaving the host community seldom in aposition of self-representation.

In rural development, after surveying four projectsimplemented in various regions in Thailand, Trebuil statesthat ironically, even with the best intentions, the rationa-lisation of agriculture has yielded clear `winners' and`losers'. Those who are well set up with land ownership,access to capital=collateral, knowledge, education and

advice and labour are able to capitalise signi®cantly onthe `second green revolution'. However, up to one-third ofthe agricultural workforce have also been marginalised bysuch agricultural modernisation, displaced from the land,and eventually forced to migrate to urban areas. Garforthand Suthasupa analogously ®nd that agricultural exten-sion services, which are ostensibly implemented forbene®tting the weak and the disadvantaged, oftenunconsciously pass them by because of inherent problemsin design and implementation.

The contributors in this book are by and large highlycritical of the unevenness of development in Thailand.More importantly, however, the analyses and conclusionsunderlying their stance are more than simplistic andideological rhetoric. All of the essays are characterised bya consistent richness through use of empirical data, andmost authors have been meticulous and thorough in theiranalyses. It is to the credit of the book that contributionsfrom Thai researchers are incorporated and represented inthis volume. Their inside knowledge and sensitivity tolocal conditions have provided much insight and illumi-nation not only into the complexities and perils of capi-talist development, but also the danger of blindlyaccepting the fads associated with it.

For example, Parnwell and Khamanarong eschew thefashionable notion of rural development as a panacea forthe ailment of uneven development. As they haveremarked, `There are very good reasons why the patternof industrialisation in Thailand is so heavily biased infavour of Bangkok � � � We should also be aware that the`industrialisation of the countryside' carries the attendantrisk of spreading more widely some of the problemswhich have come to characterise industrialisation in theurban setting, not least among them environmental andresource pressures' (p. 184). Likewise, Parnwell refrainsfrom the current popular sentiment in idealising NGOsand he notes that `we should not be drawn into believingthat grassroots actions will inevitably turn the tide' againstsuch unevenness in Thailand's development (p. 287).

At a time when economic growth is spreading morewidely to other nations int he East and Southeast Asianregions, and decision-makers are all too ready to believein the glory of economic miracles, this book has offeredtimely and refreshing reminders of the social costs andburdens people have to bear. These are the realities whichall practitioners in the ®eld of development would dowell to ponder.

David IpDepart. of Anthropology and Sociology

The University of QueenslandBrisbane

Queensland 4072Australia

REFERENCE

Aseniero, G. (1996) Asian in the World System, in: TheUnderdevelopment of Development, Essays in Honor ofAndre Gunder Frank, Chew, S.C. and Denemark, R.A.(eds), Sage Publishing.

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# 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment. SUST. DEV. VOL. 5: 95±99, 1997