Links to my articles on bangkokpost.com (will open in new tab)

Do you owe income tax in Thailand?
If you stay more than 180 days in any calendar year in Thailand, you are considered a Thai tax resident, and since the beginning of 2024, any money you remit, or bring into the country, is assessable for income tax.

Why Thai-Cambodian border conflict still festers
Duelling civilisations going back 1,000 years and a poorly drawn colonial map are to blame, says scholar

Thailand weighs casino legalisation
Lessons from Singapore, Las Vegas and beyond as uncertainty surrounds the stalled Entertainment Complex Bill

Aid cuts could affect US itself
“Armageddon” is the word veteran human rights campaigner Phil Robertson uses to describe the sudden shutdown of most of the US’ aid programmes around the world.

Vaping a way to cut smoking death toll?
Over the past 20 years, fewer than 100 people worldwide have died from vaping, while more than 100 million people have died from smoking regular cigarettes. In Thailand, the tobacco death toll is 71,000 people each year, and from vaping – zero. So why are cigarettes available in every convenience store, while e-cigarettes are banned?

‘Humans to blame’ for devastating floods in Northern Thailand
Campaigner Pianporn ‘Pai’ Deetes identifies three specific causes of the problem: deforestation, dams, and encroachment

Explainer: Thailand’s new visas
Details of the new 5-year ‘Destination Thailand’ visa, the 60-day entry stamp, and more

Reforestation seen as only viable smog solution
Animal agriculture, not fossil fuels, is becoming the biggest driver of climate change worldwide

New cannabis bill ‘restricts freedoms’
Activist rejects claim of many complaints

Ban wildlife trade to prevent next pandemic: campaigner
Freeland founder Steve Galster says trafficking in wildlife, both protected and legal, spreads zoonotic diseases

Respect nature, pleads wildlife trafficking cop
A deeper dive into Thailand’s illegal trafficking of wild animals, a lucrative industry worth US$20 billion

Bitcoin booms and crypto conundrums
Bitkub CEO ‘Topp’ Jirayut Srupsrisopa outlines the pitfalls and potential of blockchain-based assets

‘Superpimp’-turned-whistleblower won’t give up fight
Chuvit Kamolvisit, who says Thailand is corrupt to the core, advocates legalising gambling and sin taxes to top up junior police salaries

Fighting Thailand’s ‘scamdemic’
Industrial-scale online crime in ‘lawless’ border areas in neighbouring countries is growing in volume and sophistication

Feeding the beast: Chiang Mai smoke seen as world’s climate change problem
From Chiang Mai air pollution to global climate change, animal agriculture is the elephant in the room — and biochar one way to tame it.

Slaughtering the planet — on a farm
Many scientists say animal agriculture is a bigger driver of climate change than fossil fuels, contrary to popular belief (with video embeds)

How has Thailand kept the lid on Covid?
A panel of experts discusses how Thailand, the first country to record an infection outside China, managed to bring Covid-19 under control (with video embed)

Economist calls for ‘blanket rescue’
Bangkok Bank’s chief economist outlines his suggested response to the coronavirus pandemic (with video embed)

Dictating the internet
A new report unveils how governments manipulate tech laws to assault free speech

Reporter’s Notebook: Hong Kong protests – behind the barricade
My reflections after two months in Hong Kong (with video embed)

QuickWrap Newscast
A short summary of some of the week’s top stories (with video embed)

Exclusive interview with ILO director-general Guy Ryder
International Labour Organization chief waxes knowledgeable on everything from fishing slavery to AI (with video embed)

Exclusive interview with Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit
I spoke to the Thai billionaire opposition leader before the 2019 election (with video embeds)

Exclusive interview with Abhisit Vejjajiva
I spoke to the former Democrat leader and Thai prime minister a week before the 2019 election (with video embed)

Political explainer: Thailand’s Senate
I describe the complicated, carefully engineered appointment mechanisms for the Thai Senate (with video embed)

China’s heavenly nature
My ‘B’ magazine cover story about Mount Qingcheng, a verdant wonderland known as the historical birthplace of Taoism (with video embed)
See print story

Prachuap Khiri Khan by big bike
I joined a motorcycle tour of one of Thailand’s most beautiful provinces
See print story

Jungle Aid
A Hua Hin-based NGO provides a lifeline to poor Karen villagers

Rabies epidemic is ‘fake news’
Animal activists decry hysteria

Festive skydining
Paid advertorial for a Bangkok restaurant (under pseudonym)

Europe tightens curbs with economic toll worsening: Virus update
An example of how I use embeds to enrich wire stories

The post Bangkok Post stories appeared first on Dave Kendall.

If you stay more than 180 days in any calendar year in Thailand, you are considered a Thai tax resident, and since the beginning of 2024, any money you remit, or bring into the country, is assessable for income tax.

But what counts as a remittance – does it include ATM withdrawals and credit card purchases?

Are certain income types, such as government pensions, exempt?

If you have money saved overseas before 2024, can you transfer it tax-free now?

Are remittances from joint accounts or family transfers taxable?

How do Double Tax Agreements work for expats living in Thailand?

Can Thai authorities see your overseas bank accounts or investments?

And do digital nomads on the Destination Thailand visa need to file Thai tax returns?

To answer those questions and more, Dave Kendall is joined by Carl Turner, Co-founder of Expat Tax Thailand, and Sarawoot Intapanom, the firm’s Strategic Government Advisor.

The post Expat income tax in Thailand appeared first on Dave Kendall.

The long-simmering conflict between Thailand and Cambodia over the demarcation of their 817km border has exploded in 2025, with batteries of air strikes and heavy artillery that have killed more than 40 people and displaced hundreds of thousands.

But what are the root causes of the clashes? 

In this epic edition of Bangkok Post’s “Deeper Dive” podcast, Thitinan Pongsudhirak, Professor of International Relations at the Faculty of Political Science at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, explains that the resentments date back a thousand years, the disputed border is a colonial legacy, and the hostilities are intertwined with Thai and Cambodian domestic politics.

The post Roots of the Thai-Cambodian border conflict appeared first on Dave Kendall.

Casinos polarise opinion.

They’re legal in parts of north America and Europe but mostly illegal in the Middle East, South Asia and Southeast Asia – including Thailand. But that could be changing.

The legalisation of casinos is part of the Entertainment Complex bill in the Thai parliament, although opposition has recently pushed the bill to the bottom of the agenda.

The draft bill states that a casino can take no more than 10% of an integrated complex that also includes components such as a hotel, a shopping mall, an amusement park, bars and restaurants.

These complexes must be in specific tourist zones such as Bangkok, Pattaya, Phuket and Chiang Mai.

For Thai nationals, access to the casino is heavily restricted, with possible requirements to pay a 5,000 baht entrance fee and prove bank deposits of up to 50 million baht.

Earnings are subject to a 17% tax and there would be strict screening, monitoring and oversight to prevent crimes such as money laundering.

Advocates say these family-friendly complexes can significantly raise revenues from tourism spending, providing a new reason for visitors to enter the country.

The disadvantages, opponents say, are a likely increase in crime and gambling addiction, and even general moral decay.

On this episode of the Bangkok Post podcast Deeper Dive, Dave Kendall speaks with an expert in the field of building entertainment complexes with casinos in countries where they were previously illegal: Bo Bernhard, Vice President of Economic Development at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

The post Legalising casinos in Thailand appeared first on Dave Kendall.

“Armageddon” is the word veteran human rights campaigner Phil Robertson uses to describe the sudden shutdown of most of the United States’ aid programmes around the world.

In January, US President Donald Trump ordered a 90-day pause on foreign aid, and weeks later, decided to terminate 90% of contracts providing such aid worldwide, including in Thailand.

“Perhaps most prominent is the work that was being done on the Thai-Myanmar border, particularly with the refugee camps,” said Mr Robertson on the Bangkok Post video podcast Deeper Dive. “As soon as the cuts were made, groups like the International Rescue Committee had to shut down their hospitals that were servicing refugees. There were a number of cases of elderly refugees who all of a sudden couldn’t get the medical care they required and died.

“And on the other side of Myanmar, in Bangladesh, in the refugee camps that are housing the Rohingya who fled ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity inflicted on them in 2017 by the military junta ­– those aid programmes largely stopped that were provided by the US.

The aid freeze directly affected the US response to the March 28 earthquake in Myanmar, with several USAID staffers receiving termination notices just after arriving. But the foreign aid programmes axed go far beyond disaster relief and medical treatment.

“There was a big Myanmar education consortium that was providing education to children all over eastern Myanmar, and that has all been shut down, said Mr Robertson, the former deputy Asia director of Human Rights Watch and the current Director of Asia Human Rights and Labor Advocates Consultancy. “And we’ve also seen the democracy and governance programmes that were, for instance, being run by Freedom House, that was providing safe houses for people fleeing the military regime in Myanmar… those have all been shut down. So it’s been a complete and total disaster.”

It’s fair to ask why an upper middle-income country like Thailand doesn’t fund these programmes itself.

“I would love to see Thailand step up and fund some of those programmes,” Mr Robertson told the podcast. “But there’s been a reluctance to do so by Thailand. Their claims are that, you know, we have a lot of poor people still that we have to support. And the refugees are a burden.

“The US assistance has helped persuade Thailand to not try to push them back.

People should remember what happened back on the Cambodia border, you know, 40 years ago where there were pushbacks. And ultimately, you know, it was the international community stepping in and saying to Thailand, ‘You can’t send those people back. You need to treat them humanely. And we’re going to provide resources and support to allow them to stay.’

“That was persuasive in getting the Thai government to change course. So, I mean, I think we have to be realists here: there’s an effort, I think, by some other donors to try to step up, but they’re just not going to be able to meet the scale and breadth of what the US was funding.”

Aside from the suffering directly caused by the cuts, Mr Robertson argues that it’s in America’s own interest to stay engaged with the world and solve problems before they land on US shores – for instance, strains of disease that are resistant to antibiotics.

“There’s a larger interest in the US, for instance, supporting malarial initiatives along that border, because the Thai-Myanmar border is the source of the various resistant strains of both tuberculosis and malaria, where, you know, if those get into the United States, there’s going to be a major problem.

“So when you talk about providing assistance to try to deal with international health challenges like malaria, there’s an incentive, I think, from the US to recognise that those things can come to the US if they’re not dealt with somewhere else.

“You know, ‘make America go it alone’ is not ‘make America great again’. It’s ‘make America stand by itself’. And I think that America standing by itself is going to be weaker. It’s going to be less connected, and it’s going to be more easily surprised and shocked by these sorts of things that arrive at its borders.

“They basically have cut off the links and cut off the connections with other communities and governments and organisations around the world that previously would have alerted the US and said, you know, time to step up and try to figure out the situation right here where it’s easier to fix, it’s cheaper to fix, and it’s going to result in less human suffering if we fix it right now, rather than let it get worse.”

The post US aid cuts: How Thailand is affected appeared first on Dave Kendall.

An average of 47 people in Thailand die from smoking cigarettes every day, while there has not been a single recorded death here from using e-cigarettes. Millions of people have successfully used vaping to quit smoking, and many countries actively promote vaping as a means to quit the deadly habit. Yet conventional cigarettes are available in every Thai convenience store, while e-cigarettes are illegal. Government officials and news headlines trumpet the supposed dangers of vaping, but stay silent on smoking even as it kills 71,000 Thais every year – the single biggest preventable cause of death.

Why?

This is the question pondered in the latest Deeper Dive Thailand podcast featuring Asa Saligupta, who became a proponent of vaping after he was diagnosed with spots on his lungs in 2001. He first vaped in 2005, and has done so continuously since quitting cigarettes. “In 2019 I went back and I did like a what is called a lung capacity test,” he said. “The doctor, he was so surprised, he remembered me. He said, ‘So you did quit smoking.’ I said, ‘Yeah, I did quit smoking to do vaping.’ He said, ‘Good for you, man,’ because all the spots were gone.”

Hours of searching through peer-reviewed scientific journals reveals no evidence to support the frequent assertion of Thai officials that vaping is as dangerous as smoking. Britain’s National Health Service said vaping is “far less harmful than cigarettes”, and vaping is actively promoted in the UK as a means to lower the death toll from smoking. In 2015 an independent review published by Public Health England that included the results of animal testing concluded that vaping devices are about 95% safer than smoking cigarettes.

“Vaping has been around for 20 years at least,” Mr Asa told the podcast. “We have hundreds of thousands of testimonials of type people saying vaping is safer.

“The main reason for cancer from smoking is because of the combustion,” he continued. “Vaping or even the heated tobacco products, they don’t have combustion. Combustion leads to tar and tar is the main item that that coats your lungs and causes cancer. Plus, there are lots and lots and lots of carcinogens in regular tobacco.”

Since the first e-cigarettes appeared about 20 years ago, more than 100 million people have been killed by cigarettes, while fewer than 100 deaths have been attributed to vaping – a ratio of 10,000,000:1 – and most of those fatalities were during the EVALI outbreak of 2019-2020 that was caused by a specific brand of THC-containing vape juice laced with Vitamin E-acetate.

“Specifically there was this one company that … mix it with vitamin E acetate and when it was heated and cooled down, it became so sticky and gooey and covered the lung, explained Mr Asa. “The FDA had come out and accepted that was the main cause.”

So why the anti-vaping hysteria? One motivation appears to be economic. The Bangkok Post quoted an official from the autonomous government agency ThaiHealth as saying, “E-cigarettes will have a widespread effect on tobacco farmers in the country,” .., farmers will suffer income loss.”

It’s reasonable to question whether it is worth 71,000 lives a year to protect tobacco farmers. If it doesn’t matter that their crop is deadly, why not let them grow opium? It costs an estimated 93 billion baht to treat smoking-related diseases every year, which could be used to compensate farmers for growing something else or rewilding the land to help fight climate change.

In fact, Mr Asa said farmers could continue growing tobacco – the crop could be used partially for heat-not-burn devices, and partially to produce liquid nicotine for vape juice. “I have talked with tobacco farmers,” Mr Asa told the podcast. “Of course…the main concern is for, you know, we have to take our family first. I understand that. But within half an hour or 45 minutes, they completely understood the benefit.”

If vaping is indeed much safer than smoking, as all the evidence suggests it is, then one burning question is: does vaping help smokers quit? A 2021 peer-reviewed found that daily e-cigarette usage among US tobacco smokers can increase the likelihood of quitting smoking eightfold. A 2019 peer-reviewed randomized control study also found that daily e-cigarette use leads to an almost doubled rate of smoking abstinence compared to other nicotine-replacement products after one year.

“Vaping helps people quit smoking,” said Mr Asa. “The British government even handed out vape items to those people who want to quit smoking.”

If vaping is much safer than smoking and does help people quit cigarettes, the inevitable question is: How many lives has Thailand’s ban cost? The question can also be extended to Thailand’s millions of foreign tourists, some of whom will have returned to their deadly smoking habit while in the kingdom.

A final objection to vaping is that it could serve as a gateway to smoking. A 2023 research letter found that exclusive e-cigarette users are unlikely to transition to combustible tobacco. On the other hand, a joint survey by Thailand’s Ministry of Public Health, Ministry of Education and the World Health Organization found that Thai vapers aged 13-15 were up to three times more likely to use tobacco products in the future. What could explain the opposite findings? One explanation could be that because e-cigarettes are illegal in Thailand, they’re harder to obtain; once someone’s hooked on nicotine and they can’t find a vape, they might well smoke a regular cigarette available in every convenience store to get their fix – an argument that e-cigarettes should be at least as widely available as toxic, combustible cigarettes.

However, that study also showed something that people on both sides of the issue find disturbing – that the use of e-cigarettes among those Thai children between the ages of 13 and 15 increased from 3.3% in 2015 to 8.1% in 2021. And everyone agrees that e-cigarettes should not be used by or marketed to children.  

“Why don’t we say like, let’s ban promotion [aimed at] kids and young people, not the product itself,” Mr Asa told the podcast. “And if you want to ban something, let’s ban toy pods.” The additional revenue from taxing vaping devices could be used to strictly enforce the law.

Finally, Mr Asa is adamant that vaping is strictly a way to stop smoking; nobody who does not already smoke should try an e-cigarette and risk getting addicted to nicotine. Because while it’s the delivery system – smoking combustible cigarettes – that causes most of the damage to health, nicotine itself is not entirely harmless – it leads to an increased risk of cardiovascular disease, it can affect brain development, particularly in adolescents, and it affects bone health. So while there’s a strong argument that e-cigarettes should be legalised, controlled and taxed, they should only be used as a way to quit far more dangerous cigarettes, as they are in neighbouring countries like Philippines and Indonesia. Some of the tax and customs revenue could be used to take additional measures to keep all vaping devices out of the hands of children.

“Our main thing,” said Mr Asa, “is that we want some kind of choice for people who have no choice, either vaping or smoking. Those two choices. Then of course I recommend vaping instead of smoking.”

One thing that is clear despite the clouds of anti-vaping propaganda: e-cigarettes are already prevalent in Thailand. “The market is already here,” Mr Asa pointed out. “Just pick up your phone and search Google for prices, a whole list will come out,…they deliver to your door. And [they’re available] in flea markets and even in department stores.” In fact, the biggest danger may lie in the fact that unlicensed devices and e-liquid (that could be sourced from Thai farmers) are flowing into the kingdom without inspections and quality control.

What does the future hold for vaping’s legality in the kingdom? Mr Asa said the majority of a committee set up last year to study the issue recommended that vaping be legalised, but he wasn’t sure it would happen because of entrenched interests.

“I could only hope for that,” he said. “That they would at least listen to reason and logic and scientific evidence.”

The post VAPING: SAFER THAN SMOKING? appeared first on Dave Kendall.

Flooding has devasted many parts of Thailand in 2024. More than 50 people lost their lives in kingdom’s North earlier in the year, and at least 25 have recently been killed in the South.

While climate change is partly responsible, there are specific man-made causes for the disaster, “Pai” Pianporn Deetes told Bangkok Post’s “Deeper Dive” podcast. The Southeast Asia programme director for the NGO International Rivers identified three specific roots for the problem: deforestation, dams and encroachment.

Deforestation

It is ironic that a trigger for flooding is also responsible for the annual PM2.5 haze in Northern Thailand – deforestation to plant corn for animal feed, and the subsequent burning of the cornfields – leading to “half flood, half haze”, as Ms Pianporn described locals’ plight.

Aside from burning down the forests on both sides of the border with Myanmar to plant maize, mining is also a factor, particularly in neighbouring Shan State. “Satellite imagery showed they are mining – could be gold mining, and it seems to be illegal…in Myanmar after the coup three years ago, there are no such laws in place,” she told the vodcast. “In Myanmar there are less reports because of the absence of journalism or civil society space.

“So there’s lots of activities, like open sites for mining in the upper reaches of the Mae Sai River as well as plantations, monocrop plantations that can be a major cause of the mud flood in Mae Sai district of Chiang Rai as well as Tachilek district of Myanmar.

“The deforestation does worsen or exacerbate the flood effect on population, it causes a large volume of mud and sediment flowing into the cities, the villages and the towns.

“The recovery is still happening in Mae Sai. The heavy machines are still working to bring the sediment out, all mud out of their houses of people.”

Dams

The spreading number of dams upstream is also a contributing cause of the flooding in Northern Thailand. “The flood that happened during the past two months has

something to do with dams on the Mekong too because that rain also happened in Southern Yunnan and the dams up there have to release water,” the activist said. “We can see that the water from the flood area in Chiang Rai released slower because of the high volume of the Mekong River flow.

“So it is important for the case of the Mekong, in the case of the internationals rivers like this, it is important for governments to talk to each other… We are not blaming anyone, [but] I believe that Chinese as an upstream superpower needs to listen to downstream neighbours because we are sharing this water course together. The Office of Water Resources already submitted a letter to China to asking them to operate the dams with recognition of downstream floods and disasters.”

Encroachment

Aside from deforestation and dams, Ms Pianporn identified encroachment on the rivers themselves as a major cause of flooding. “I discussed with one historian…the real cause of this flood in Chiang Rai city. He showed the old imagery of ancient Chiang Rai…even my foundation, my mum’s foundation office in the outskirts of Chiang Rai town, it happens to be on the old river course.

“So our office is right there on the old river! And we didn’t know that.”

Building flood walls, she argues, is not the answer.

“In many cases like Sukothai or Nakhon Sawan… they have a flood wall between the river and the city. But many cases around the world show that the flood wall can be very dangerous once it breaks and the impacts will be even more severe.

“So I think for the cities or towns in the northern region, I will recommend nature-based solutions.”

Ms Pianporn is a supporter of “sponge cities”, integrating towns with wetlands and lakes, perhaps using permeable asphalt for the roads. But in some cases, she said, relocation is inevitable, “moving very dangerous areas, communities to other places. But this should not be forced relocation, but it should be in a constructive way. How to include everybody’s concern, how to compensate adequately?”

The overriding need right now, Ms Pianporn told the podcast, is to start addressing the issues and working with nature, rather than against it – and a cascade of cooperation is needed.

“I think the most important thing is that to recognise the real problem and identify the key factors and consult with multiple stakeholders, the experts, the engineers, the farmers, the urban dwellers and academics, those people will collectively find the solution together, not just Royal Irrigation Department or Ministry of Interior alone.

I believe that collectively we can, but I still don’t see this process of consultation or meaningful consultation with different stakeholders.”

The post Behind Thailand’s flooding appeared first on Dave Kendall.

Thailand’s recent relaxation of visa restrictions was necessary for both the economy and social stability, says a leading travel historian, because the kingdom is deeply dependent on tourism.

On the latest edition of the Bangkok Post vodcast “Deeper Dive”, Imtiaz Muqbil worries that countries will compete with each other for tourist revenue in a race to the bottom that risks “overtourism” in certain areas.

But he says the industry itself can solve these problems by using better marketing and promotion strategies.

He says that the loosening of borders brings an inevitable rise in criminal activity that can only be mitigated, not prevented.

And finally, he says that since the end of the Second World War, travel and tourism have had a higher purpose – to promote cultural understanding and world peace.

Watch the episode by pressing “Play” below or by following https://bit.ly/3BbNkkY. Or you can listen to the audio-only version by searching for “Deeper Dive Thailand” wherever you get your podcasts.

The post Thailand, tourism and global harmony appeared first on Dave Kendall.

Thailand’s major overhaul of visas and entry rules has stirred up strong reactions — mostly joy and excitement, but also confusion and even some resentment.

To clarify the new rules, the Bangkok Post’s Deeper Dive vodcast posed readers’ questions to Naruchai Ninnad, one of the chief architects of the new visa scheme in his role as deputy director-general of the Department of Consular Affairs at Thailand’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. You can watch the full interview below, watch directly on Spotify or search for “Deeper Dive Thailand” wherever you get your podcasts. 

The post Thailand’s new visas appeared first on Dave Kendall.

Once again, northern Thailand is choking under a blanket of toxic smog. What’s really causing it – and how can we get rid of it for good?

Many experts believe cutting down forests to plant corn for animal feed is a major cause of the air pollution, with Chiang Mai ranked the world’s worst for several days in mid-March.

Animal agriculture is the elephant in the room during the climate debate, as portrayed in the documentary narrated by Kate Winslet, “Eating Our Way to Extinction“.

Read newspaper article

The post Thailand’s burning issue appeared first on Dave Kendall.