Thailand Cities of the Future : Urban Foundations for a High-Income Economy

Overview & Synopsis

Thailand has already urbanized. The task now is to make the urban system work. More than half of humanity already calls a city home, and the share is expected to reach around 68–70 percent by 2050. Thailand’s high-income ambition is, in this sense, an urban agenda: improving the efficiency, reliability, and resilience of its major city-regions so they can support modern services and advanced manufacturing, retain talent, and connect domestic firms to regional and global markets. The structural transition from rural to urban has already happened. What has not yet happened is the corresponding transition in urban performance: Thai cities have the scale and sectoral diversity of a middle-income urban system but translate these assets into productivity at rates closer to the lower bound of peer countries than to the frontier. This report establishes why cities are the arena in which Thailand’s high-income transition will succeed or fail, and introduces the evidence the rest of the report builds on.