Golf in Thailand: from sport to business

In this paper the author attempts to describe some of the basic parameters of golf development in Thailand and to outline the process of transformation of golf facilities from simple sporting establishments to large-scale integrated leisure complexes. The establishment of recent golf projects cannot be separated from the large-scale development of leisure communities at the heart of which are weekend housing estates and condominiums, in which golf courses are an attractive, but from a business perspective, marginal factor. The proliferation of these housing estates is engendered by complex environmental and socio-economic factors, especially the growing environmental deterioration of the Bangkok metropolitan area and the emergence of a highly mobile urban middle class. While the new leisure communities create a new kind of dependency of locals upon outsider developers, they also provide alternative sources of employment in agriculturally declining and marginal areas and help to prevent increased rural-to-urban migration. -from Author