Thailand Population

The Southeast Asian country of Thailand is known for its gorgeous tropical beaches, ancient ruins, ornate temples, and boisterous nightlife. It attracts a generous amount of international and domestic tourists each year that flock to the country to visit its fashionable beach resorts and the ultramodern city of Bangkok.

It is the 50th largest country in the world and the 22nd most populous in the world, with just over 69 million residents. It is made up of over 1,430 islands and borders Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia, and Malaysia and its coastline is on the Gulf of Thailand. Thailand is a founding member of ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Nations, and is a major ally of the United States.

A majority rural population

Much of Thailand’s population continues to live in rural areas. People are especially concentrated in the rice growing areas of the country’s central, northern, and northeastern regions. However, in 2018 the amount of people living in urban areas—principally in greater Bangkok—surpassed those living in rural areas with 35.8 million living in urban areas to the 33.9 living in rural areas. These numbers can be misleading though, since millions of Thais migrate from rural to urban areas and then back again throughout the year to help with seasonal field world. Many of these people have official rural residency but spend much of the year living in urban areas.

A population heavily affected by the AIDS epidemic

Thailand has one of the highest instances of HIV infections in Asia and the Pacific, with nine percent of all people living with HIV in the region confined to the small country. There are over 700,000 Thai that are HIV or AIDS positive and approximately two percent of all adult men and 1.5 percent adult females living with the disease. Each year, the country suffers between 3,000 and 5,000 deaths related to HIV to AIDS-related illnesses.

An aggressive public health and education campaign was implemented in the early 1990s to try to reduce the number of new cases. This has shown great success and reduced the number of infections from 150,000 to fewer than 10,000 annually. The country has also become the first country to effectively eliminate mother-to-child transmissions.

A booming tourism trade with a dark underbelly

Tourism makes up about six percent of the country’s economy and contributes 12 trillion baht annually to the Thai GDP. Thailand is one of the most visited countries in Southeast Asia and it sees around 32.5 million tourists each year—a number that continues to rise each year. The country is so inundated with tourists that major tourist areas have separate police forces and different emergency numbers to accommodate visitors.

A big draw for many is sex tourism

Prostitution is heavily promoted and is considered a de facto part of the economy. Unfortunately, Thailand has a reputation for being a center of child sex tourism and child prostitution. Both girls and boys as young as ten years old are prostituted throughout Thailand, some even being abducted from their homes for the purposes of child prostitution.

A large expatriate community

There are thousands of Western expats living in Thailand, many of which live in the northeastern region and 90% of which live with Thai spouses. However, the largest community of foreigners are the Burmese, followed by the Cambodians and Laotians. There are over 770,000 Cambodian migrants in Thailand, about five percent of the total population of Cambodia. Around 3.87 percent of Thailand’s population are of foreign origin.

A dropping population

Thailand’s aggressive population control campaign helped drop the growth rate of the country from 3.0 to 0.26%. However, the population is now predicted to begin dropping by 2030 as the median age continues to rise. While the current median age of the country is 39 years old, one tenth of the population is over 60 and its predicted that the percentage of Thais aged 60-plus will increase from 17.5 percent in 2020 to 25.2 percent in 2030.