Forget the criticism, just read the Legatum Prosperity rankings for 2015

English isn’t my mother tongue so I am not going to challenge Gilles Bernard verbally the way he challenged me. But may I ask him to read the Legatum Prosperity Index 2015 once again. Because The Prosperity Index ranks every country on the list year by year. This “year by year” ranking shows Thailand did a big leap on the Prosperity Index from:
52nd place in 2013
51st place in 2014
48th place in 2015
This big positive jump has to be and should be credited Prayut, and does not belong elsewhere, as Bernard claims.
My writing was an attempt to counter some of the heavy and often not-so-fair attacks on Prayut during recent months.
The Legatum Prosperity Index 2015 also shows that Thailand has the 15th most prosperous economy in the world in the rating for the sole year of 2015, which is the most recent rating from the Legatum Institute, which also happened to be a year with Prayut in power. Only 30 countries in the world are considered economically prosperous on this 2015 index.
Readers should rather have a look by themselves than have faith in Gilles Bernhard’s interpretation. Why make current Thailand look worse than it actually is? BBC’s Jonathan Head is another on the same negative bandwagon when he writes on Twitter.... “Its performance in the two years since it seized power has been muddled, the economy is in poor shape ......”
Prayut is on an upstream voyage towards democracy, of course not ideal with the military as midwives, but it’s much more to have faith in for many Thais than the different failed dictatorial self-serving tax-avoiding Shinawatra democratic regimes. The result from the referendum probably gives us an indication?
A Johnsen
(Lucky to come from the country rated top 7 years in a row on the Legatum Prosperity Index)