Methodology and editorial standards

This page explains how figures on ThailandStats are sourced, processed and presented. It applies to every statistics page on the site.

Sources

We use primary publishers wherever they exist: Thai government ministries and agencies, the Bank of Thailand, state enterprises that publish operating statistics, and international bodies such as the World Bank. Each source is recorded with its publisher, the specific dataset or table used, how often it is released and its licence. The full list is on the sources page.

From source to page

1. Retrieve. The original file is downloaded and stored unchanged, with the retrieval date.
2. Validate. Automated checks reject files with unknown provinces or countries, invalid dates, missing units, duplicate rows or values that do not parse.
3. Normalise. Values are converted to a common structure: one row per metric, period, place and breakdown, with a fixed unit. Provinces use ISO 3166-2:TH codes and countries use ISO 3166-1 codes, so names spelled differently by different publishers still match.
4. Publish. Pages are generated from the processed data. Numbers in text, charts and tables come from the same file, so they cannot drift apart.

How values are labelled

Not every number is final. Each value carries one of these statuses, and non-final values are labelled on the page:

• Official: the publisher's final, settled figure.
• Provisional: published early and expected to change.
• Revised: changed by the publisher after first release.
• Estimated: modelled or estimated rather than counted.
• Forecast: a projection of a future period.
• Historical: from a series that has been discontinued or replaced.

Labels combine a symbol and a word, so they do not rely on colour.

Dates on each page

Statistics pages show separate dates because they mean different things:

• Published and updated refer to the page itself.
• Data through is the latest period the data covers.
• Source retrieved is when we last downloaded the data from its publisher.

A page updated today can show data through an earlier year, because official statistics are released with a delay.

Editorial rules

• No figure is published without a named source.
• Every number states its period, unit and geography.
• We do not round in ways that change meaning, and we give the unrounded value in tables.
• We explain definitions where they matter, for example registered population versus resident population.
• Written context is factual and short. We avoid speculation and do not attribute causes the data cannot support.

Corrections and updates

When a publisher revises data, the page is updated and the revision is noted. When we make an error, we correct it and record the correction on the page.