Frequently asked questions

EIU and Mercer cover Bangkok and stop. TLI covers all 77 Thai provinces, scoring each on 30 indicators. The two global indices are calibrated for cross-country comparison (Singapore vs. Lagos). TLI is calibrated for within-country differentiation, so the variance that matters when choosing between two Thai provinces (burning-season air quality, distance to a tertiary hospital, proximity to an airport, flood exposure) is visible at provincial resolution.

Numbeo is user-submitted with severe sample bias. Bangkok carries thousands of submissions; most Thai provinces have fewer than ten submissions, are gameable, and go stale. TLI uses official data from named upstream sources (Thai government statistics agencies, OpenAQ, ACLED, OpenStreetMap, NASA) with full provenance on every number. The methodology, indicator dictionary, and code are open.

Bangkok's 50 khets vary enormously, and a province-level Bangkok score conceals real differences. The current canonical unit of measurement is the Thai province, fixed by administrative definition. A future iteration of TLI will surface destination-level overlays for heterogeneous provinces (Bangkok's khets, Krabi's beaches versus its inland, Phuket's east versus west). v1.0 is provincial.

These are not provinces. Pattaya is part of Chon Buri; Koh Samui, Koh Phangan, and Koh Tao are part of Surat Thani; Hua Hin is part of Prachuap Khiri Khan. The site search resolves the destination name to its parent province automatically: type "Pattaya" and the search returns Chon Buri.

Each indicator carries an AS OF date that reflects the freshest upstream pull. Refresh cadence varies by source: PM2.5 air-quality data refreshes daily, internet-speed data refreshes monthly, gross provincial product refreshes annually. The full refresh cadence per source is on the data sources page.

TLI is built and maintained by William J. Reynolds (ORCID 0009-0005-1217-7465). The methodology is grounded in the academic urban-livability literature (Higgs et al. 2019 for the framework, Alderton et al. 2019 for the low-to-middle-income country adaptation, the OECD/JRC composite-indicator handbook for aggregation rules, the UN Human Development Report 2020 for the geometric-mean choice). The scoring code, methodology document, and source roster are all public on GitHub.

Gross provincial product per capita in Rayong, Chon Buri, Chachoengsao, and adjacent provinces sits far above the national distribution because of industrial concentration along the Eastern Seaboard. The methodology clips at the upper goalpost (350,000 baht per capita per year) by design, so seven Eastern Seaboard plus Bangkok provinces all share the score-100 ceiling. The methodology page explains the clip.

No. TLI scores are absolute, calibrated against fixed methodology goalposts (not against the distribution of Thai provinces). A province scoring 60 means the value sits at the methodology's "good" benchmark, not that the province scored better than 60% of other provinces. The benefit is year-over-year comparability: a 2026 score of 72 means the same as a 2030 score of 72 even if the underlying distribution shifts.

Yes. The methodology, indicator dictionary, and data outputs are published under CC BY-NC 4.0, free for academic, journalistic, personal, civic, and Thai-government use with attribution. The standard citation form is on the about page. Future releases will mint Zenodo DOIs for version-pinned citations.

Commercial use is reserved and not currently licensed. The full reservation notice is on the licensing page. Informational expressions of interest may be sent to licensing@thailand-livability-index.com; these are recorded for awareness only and do not constitute commercial transactions.