Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
"With only 6.9 million people—more than half of them ethnic Lao who are related to the Thai of Thailand—the country has a woefully inadequate infrastructure, hardly any industry, and less than 5 percent of its land is suitable for agriculture. Laos is only one-third urbanized, but the capital and largest city, Vientiane, has a fast-growing population of just over one million. Communist Laos has been very slow to follow the lead of its neighbors in opening up its economy, but today momentum is finally beginning to build. The country’s first stock market began operating in 2011. Around the same time, a major new hydropower project on the central Laotian Nam Theun River, a tributary of the Mekong, began producing electricity for much of central Laos as well as selling surplus power to Thailand. . . . Moreover, the soon-to-be-completed high-speed rail line from Kunming to Vientiane is certain to pull Laos even more tightly into China’s orbit." [Geography: Realms, Regions, and Concepts, 17th Edition, p. 437]