ABSTRACT
In Asia, there has been a partial separation of factories from their assumed and traditional urban and peri-urban locations. In Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, the Philippines and – in this instance – Thailand, there are large, export-oriented, often foreign-invested factories in areas that have traditionally been regarded as resolutely ‘rural’. The reasons for this are not hard to discern: primarily, cheap land and the availability of low-cost labour. With improving communications and government policies that have promoted the dispersal of industry to poorer (rural) regions, some of the impediments and disincentives for rural industrialisation have also been removed or ameliorated. The result, in Thailand, is that the industrial investment frontier has moved outwards from the metropolitan core (Bangkok), to the wider Central Plains region and Eastern Seaboard, in some instances leap-frogging to even more distant areas in the Northern (Lamphun), Northeastern (Korat) and Southern (Songkhla) regions.1
