Lao-Thai community marks traditional new year with food and dances in Paris

On May 17, several hundred members of Paris’s Lao and Thai communities gathered at the TEP Agnès Tirop sports ground in the city’s 10th arrondissement for the Fête populaire du Nouvel An lao/thaï, or the Lao-Thai New Year community festival, a one-day festival organised by the association Khao Niao Solidarité, which is the Lao diaspora association in France.

Laos and the Limits of China-Backed Development

Laos is not simply facing a debt crisis. It is hitting the structural ceiling of a development model built on large-scale Chinese finance, where rapid infrastructure expansion has come at the expense of fiscal resilience, productive capacity and economic flexibility.