Population pyramid for Thailand

A German-language news post about a recent cabinet decision trying to increase the birth rate reminded me that I wanted to post about the age distribution in Thailand already. The DOPA statistics page has the age distribution for every year since 1993, and even not just for the whole country but down to subdistrict level. Though my Excel skills aren't that great, I managed to build a automatically calculated graphic.

Age pyramid 2017

One can clearly see in this pyramid that the Thai population is aging, and the number of births has decreased a lot. There are two bulges, one of births around 1970 and a smaller one for births around 1995 - maybe simply those from the 1970 bulge having children at that time. The pyramid is not much different from that of the industrialized countries in Europe.

I am currently adding the national age pyramid data from those DOPA statistics into my XML, and since it is probably easier to use for non-technical users also add them into a spreadsheet. The census reports also include age distribution data, but so far I have only typed in a small part of those - the one from DOPA can be done with copy-and-paste and just a little manual work.

New historical sites

The new year started the same way as the last year ended considering the Royal Gazette announcements - both the final one and the first announcements by the Fine Arts Department on historical sites.

 On December 28th, the historical site Wat Arun was announced [Gazette]. However, as it was already announced before in 1949, this time it probably was only a clarification of the extend of the protected site, as the original announcement did not include any map, but was just a listing of 36 site names all over Bangkok.

Map of Damrong Phaetyakhon residence

January 3rd a new site was announced, the residence of Phraya Damrong Phaetyakhon (Huat Wirawaithaya) [in Thai: บ้านพลตรีพระยาดำรงแพทยาคุณ (ฮวด วีระไวทยะ)], a building now used by the Operation Center for Displaced Persons (สำนักงานศูนย์ดำเนินการเกี่ยวกับผู้อพยพ) of the Ministry of Interior. As it is not far from the National Library I guess I'll have a photo opportunity next time I'm in Bangkok - I probably have to visit the National Library in order to get any detailed data on the 1919 and 1929 census, so far did not find any other library to have anything.

New geocodes

When I yesterday mentioned the geocodes missing in the October update of the ccaatt spreadsheet, I forgot to check whether there is a new version of these spreadsheet online already. Sadly there is now no text-only website anymore which indicates the last update of the tables, so I cannot rely on the web-browser app to automatically check for a new version, but have to download the Excel sheets and check them each time.

It turns out that on December 21st, both the ccaatt and the rcode files were updated, adding the missing geocodes for the new subdistricts of Bangkok and assigning a code to one further municipality.

• Ratchadaphisek subdistrict (แขวงรัชดาภิเษก), Din Daeng: 102602
• Rat Phatthana subdistrict (แขวงราษฎร์พัฒนา), Saphan Sung: 104402
• Thap Chang subdistrict (แขวงทับช้าง), Saphan Sung: 104403
• Ban Duea subdistrict municipality (เทศบาลตำบลบ้านเดื่อ), Chaiyaphum province : 3677

Population data 2017

Directly on New Year, the population data as of December 31st 2017 was made online on the DOPA website, giving the population numbers for each province, district and subdistrict. Sadly, its not possible to link to the actual data for the whole country directly, only for each province - however, the age distribution page also shows the total population numbers.

The total population has increased to 66,188,503, an increase of 256,953 or 0.4%. One percent of the registered population are foreigners. As one can see in my spreadsheet with the numbers at province level, the biggest increase by percent was in Samut Sakhon by 2.1%, in fact all of the provinces around Bangkok gained whereas Bangkok again lost a little.

Population development since 1993
(decrease in 2004 was data correction)

As a little side-note - the population data for Saphan Sung district finally gives the codes for the two new subdistricts which were forgotten in the latest update of the ccaatt spreadsheet - Rat Phatthana got the 104402 and Thap Chang the 104403. I still have to look through the data to check whether any municipality got a new code additionally to those already in the October update.

Another thing I still have to look into is the fact that at least for some months already, the population data no longer stops at the subdistrict level but also includes the administrative villages. However, as this means a tenfold increase of data (and thus download time, and XML file size) this creates some technical problems with my processing - besides the fact that the Muban data is a bit odd in some cases I have looked into so far.