Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
Political Reflection, cilt.2, sa.1, ss.53-57, 2011 (Hakemsiz Dergi)
A very interesting city, Bangkok, which was the capital city of Thailand, has been examined in this volume. Thailand is located at the heart of Southeast Asia. The country has a 68,2 million population and 6 millions of this population is living in Bangkok. This city has started to experience a different globalisation pro-cess after 1997. There have been 3 important breakpoints in the near history of Thailand. First breakpoint was the local financial crisis which occurred in 1997. After this local crisis, Thai Government has liberalized the country’s financial markets; as a result, foreign in-vestors started to be very effective in Thai stock market after this date. Second breakpoint was the tsunami disaster which hit all the coastal settle-ments of Southeast Asia in 2004; about 180,000 people died as a result of this disaster in the region. Third breakpoint was the military coup which hap-pened in 2006 in Thailand; this military intervention has divided the country as the defenders of the King (i.e.Bhumibol Adulyadej) and the defenders of the prime minister (i.e.Thaksin Shinawatra). A politi-cal instability process has started after this military coup in the country. Global investors have been interested in 3 different type of investments after the beginning of financial liberalizations in Thailand. Firstly, some global in-vestors were invested in financial sectors such as banking, insurance and asset management. Sec-ondly, some other global investors, especially from Japan, were invested in manufacturing sectors; the-se investors established many industrial manufac-turing complex in the country, especially in Bang-kok city (e.g. metal, machinery and transportation equipments, electronics and electrical appliance, paper, plastic, etc.). Thirdly, some international hy-permarket chains (i.e. carrefour and big c.) were invested in the country’s retail sector; the sectorial decisions of these two international hypermarket chains changed the structure of the retail market from oligopoly to duopoly.