Royal Gazette announcement of population numbers 2017

Last Friday, the population numbers for each province were officially announced in the Royal Gazette. The numbers were already online on January 1st on stat.dopa.go.th
 as reported here before, so there shouldn't have been any news about this - but oddly there are some differences. Whereas the total numbers are same, the numbers by nationality (Thai or foreigner) differ. These numbers are a bit hidden on stat.dopa.go.th, as they are only listed with the age pyramid data (see my blog post). For the whole country, the Gazette announcement states that there are 875,814 foreigners, whereas the age pyramid data states there are only 680,549.

The difference is that there two more rows in that statistics - the people who are currently moving, i.e. have unregistered at their old registrar but not yet registered at a new location. These are 157,722 people. The even bigger number are 722,717 who are registered only at the central registrar (ทะเบียนบ้านกลาง), but not at any local one. Thus most of the "missing" foreigners are only centrally registered, and thus don't show up as foreigners in the age statistics. I now have to think a bit how to best encode this fact in my XML files, and of course also clean up the previous years for which I already imported one of the numbers.

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.

131th National park created

Last week the 131th National Park became officially established by publishing the Royal Act in the government gazette. The park covers an area of 354 km² of Chiang Mai and Lamphun province. Oddly the Royal Act does not include the name of the park, but an older list of the IDs of the protected areas assigned by the Department of National Parks, Wildlife and Plant Conservation includes those parks in the process of being established, and thus it was possible to identify this new one to be the Mae Ta Khrai National Park (อุทยานแห่งชาติแม่ตะไคร้).

The agendas of all cabinet meetings are searchable online, and with that resource I was able to find that this new park was first discussed in November 2008, and then again in June 2016. I guess the first time was to get the go-ahead on the preparations, while the second was the final approvement to prepare the Royal Act.

According to that ID list there are still another 16 parks pending their creation - but sadly that Excel sheet is  from 2013, so there may be some other changes to that pending list in the meantime. It would be good if the DNP would have an up-to-date version of that list online, and especially not change the values anymore after a protected area became official - there are several versions of that ID list with sometimes different values floating around in long-forgotten parts of their website which only Google can still find. For example, Mae Ta Khrai according to the 2013 list has the ID 9105, however the description of the park on the DNP website uses a PTA_CODE of 9101.

Not being a stable ID is the reason why I haven't yet proposed it to become a property in Wikidata, to further help identifying the protected areas of Thailand. When I rechecked the list of items there to prepare the map below, I found one duplicate entry which was added under its present and a former name separately. The map below should show all of the current and (and least most) proposed national parks as saved in Wikidata.

Local government statistics updated

Normally, the Department of Local Administration updates their list of the local governments once a year at around the end of the fiscal year in October. Oddly, this year there was an update in March, but now effective December 1st there was another one. The only numbers which changed were the TAO, as Wang Nuea TAO was merged into Wang Nuea municipality, which became effective December 1 - thus the tables were updated exactly with that change.

• Provincial administrative organizations (PAO, องค์การบริหารส่วนจังหวัด): 76
• Municipality (Thesaban, เทศบาล): 2441
  • City (Thesaban Nakhon, เทศบาลนคร): 30
  • Town (Thesaban Mueang, เทศบาลเมือง): 178
  • Subdistrict municipality (Thesaban Tambon, เทศบาลตำบล): 2233
• Subdistrict administrative organizations (TAO, องค์การบริหารส่วนตำบล): 5333
• Special administrative units (องค์กรปกครองส่วนท้องถิ่นรูปแบบพิเศษ): 2

Source: summary_25601201
Little nitpicking - the English website of the DLA has a very outdated list of the subdivision numbers showing values from 2014.

The Excel sheets with the detailed data were also updated. I have so far only checked for the differences in the TAO sheet, and it seems the only changes (apart from the remove of Wang Nuea of course) are corrections to the population numbers which were wrong for some entries in the March version.

One new sheet has showed up, which collects the addresses of the TAO offices. Sadly, it does not include the geographic location, and since translating a Thai address into a geographical location is almost impossible it doesn't help me in adding the locations to my data.

The sheet with the numbers by province  is now translated into XML to make it easily machine-readable, but I guess the spreadsheet with the numbers by province since 2007 compiled from all the previous DLA lists is of more interest.