TABLE 1

Tort Litigation Rates in Chiangmai, Thailand (1965-96)

 
                Population Served    Tort Cases       Personal   Tort Cases per

                        by Courta                       Injury            1,000

                                                        Tortsb       Population

1965                      909,958            74             --             .081

1968                      968,738            87             --             .090

1971                    1,023,223            55             --             .054

1974                    1,086,203            66             --             .061

1992                    1,307,698            65              8             .050

1993                    1,313,735            86              9             .065

1994                    1,325,656           101             13             .076

1995                    1,332,060           148             15             .111

1996                    1,343,927           134             12             .100

199                     1,352,984           169              9             .125

a "Population Served by Court" differs from the total population of Chiangmai Province in the figures for 1992-97. During this later period, a separate trial court was established in Fang District to serve 3 of Chiangmai's 24 districts (Fang, Mae Ai, and Chai Prakan). The population figures for 1992-97 in this chart, which are provided by the Department of Local Administration of the Ministry of the Interior, do not include the populations of the 3 districts served by the Fang Provincial Court. b Data available from 1965 to 1974 do not permit a breakdown of tort cases by personal injury and non-personal-injury claims.

This rough comparison of the two time periods suggests that tort litigation rates have not increased substantially over the past 25 years, and lawsuits involving personal injuries are rare. In fact, a persuasive case could be made that these figures suggest a dramatic decrease in Chiangmai's tort litigation over the past 30 years. This is because the most accurate measure of litigation rates is not cases per population but cases per litigable harm. Population is used in litigation studies as a rough surrogate for the number of harms that could potentially become lawsuits. It is assumed that within population groups that are equal in size, this number will be roughly the same. Yet that is almost certainly not the case in Chiangmai. There is good reason to believe that the number of harms, including personal injuries, per population in Chiangmai in the 1990s is substantially greater than it was from 1965 to 1974, largely because of a very significant increase in the number of motorcycles and cars on Chiangmai's streets and highways.

It is difficult to obtain data directly comparing the number of injuries in Chiangmai province in the earlier and later periods covered by these litigation figures, but the following statistics provide indirect evidence that far more people were probably injured annually from 1992 to 1997 than from 1965 to 1974:

1. In 1970, only 2,733 households in Chiangmai province had one or more automobiles, and 10,637 had motorcycles (National Statistical Office 1970). By 1990, 54,321 households had one or more automobiles, and203,021 had motorcycles (National Statistical Office 1990). In other words, the number of households with automobiles and motorcycles increased by a factor of almost 20. By 1997, which is the final year of the litigation statistics, the number of motor vehicles was probably much higher. A 20-fold increase in households with motor vehicles almost certainly brought a substantial, if not a proportional, increase in personal injuries caused by traffic accidents.

2. It would be desirable to know the total number of motor vehicles in Chiangmai during the time period of the litigation statistics presented above, rather than the number of households that have one or more motor vehicles. Unfortunately, those figures are difficult to obtain. Statistics from 1989 to 1994, however, demonstrate that even in that short six-year period, late in the relevant time span, the number of registered vehicles in Chiangmai province increased significantly from 299,988 to 544,298 (Tinakorn and Sussangkarn 1996).

3. Similarly, it would be desirable to know the number of traffic accidents in Chiangmai during this period, but those figures were also unavailable. Anyone who has witnessed the growth in traffic congestion and dangerous conditions on Chiangmai's roads and highways over the past quarter of a century would expect that the number of accidents has skyrocketed, but official documentation of such an increase is difficult to obtain. Nationwide figures, however, are available for the number of traffic accidents throughout Thailand from 1988 to 1996. Although the time period is truncated, and the figures therefore do not reveal what was undoubtedly a much larger increase between the 1960s and the 1990s (corresponding to the litigation figures above), and even though these figures are for the entire country and not just for Chiangmai, they do suggest that in that shorter time span the number of potentially litigable traffic-related injuries in all of Thailand could have increased by 100-150% (see table 2):

TABLE 2

Traffic Accidents in Thailand (1988-1996)

                          Traffic Accidents

1988                                 42,583

1989                                 43,557

1990                                 43,646

1991                                 49,625

1992                                 61,329

1993                                 84,892

1994                                102,610

1995                                 94,362

1996                                 88,556

Source: National Statistical Office 1997.