Thailand

Abstract

Abstract Chapter 6 presents the case of Thailand, a country exhibiting within-unit change on many political and economic dimensions important to this study. While government partisanship in Peru trended from right to left from 1990 to 2015, Thailand’s governments oscillated between conservative parties and left-leaning populist parties. Moreover, some of these changes occurred not through democratic elections but through military coups. Thailand’s central role in the Asian Financial Crisis also makes it an important case for assessing whether and how major economic crises affect this book’s partisan model of sovereign debt accumulation. Finally, Thailand successfully developed its domestic bond market over this period, providing a financial resource that could affect foreign borrowing strategies. Despite these factors, the chapter shows how and why Thailand’s annual external borrowings remained informed by government partisanship.