"There are villages in Isaan that are almost entirely comprising foreign houses, where the whole village is almost entirely houses purchased by foreigners for their Thai ladies," said Phil Nicks, author of "Love Entrepreneurs: Cross-Culture Relationship Deals in Thailand".
Foreign housing investment has the potential to strengthen long-term settlements of foreigners, and to encourage the emergence of "global villages".
An estimated $24 million is scheduled to be slashed from foreign housing allowances in next year's budget.
And the now-infamous John Galliano, once of Christian Dior, is only one of many British designers snapped up by foreign houses.But there are characteristically British downsides, too.
But regulators acknowledge that this is a fat lot of good if they cannot distribute them too.Yet all this has not, so far, had foreign houses leaping up and down for joy.
only if you are single or married filing jointly and your adjusted gross income does not exceed $100,000, after adding back in foreign income, adjustments for foreign housing and other items.
Though England has long produced some of the best-trained and most inventive designers, it has never been able to compete with the commercial success of Paris or Milan, and frequently loses stars to foreign houses or to business failure.
Even before the attacks on foreign housing compounds in Riyadh in May, many writers and intellectuals in the kingdom, myself included, were being bombarded with letters and e-mail and telephone messages full of hate.
It has also benefited from depositors' fears that their money is not safe with local banks which are weighed down by ¥150 trillion $1.2 trillionn) of bad debts despite the fact that deposits at Japanese banks are covered by a government guarantee until March 2005, while those at foreign houses, such as Citi, are not.
A year after the deadline, Merrill Lynch is scaling back the business, which has racked up ¥123 billion ($920m) of losses, closing 20 of its 28 branches and cutting 1,200 of its 1,700 employees by mid-March.Other foreign houses are shrinking or even pulling out of Japan.
