Transcript of the above video:

Every now and again I like to make a video where we kind of discuss the intersection between economics, tourism, immigration, law and this is one of those such videos. I thought of making this after reading a recent article from the Bangkok Post, bangkokpost.com. I originally saw this in the print edition but we are going to go ahead and throw the bangkokpost.com article up here as a citation. The article is titled: Thai economic prospects far from rosy. The writer of this article is one of my favourite writers in Thailand and economic insights are really good. I am going to quote a small excerpt. I urge those who are watching this video, go read that article in detail, good insight in there. Quoting directly: "Despite 2.24 million foreign tourists arriving in December and spending some 100 billion Baht, Thais had to curb their consumption as factories reduced work hours due to low demand for products. The point is the economy cannot survive on tourism money alone; we need our manufacturing sector. This means the number of foreign tourists would double from 11.8 million in 2022 to 23.6 million in 2023. Although I am not entirely comfortable the Tourism Industry will keep thriving amid a slowing world economy, I will go along with others such as the Bank of Thailand who "believe" the number of foreign tourists visiting Thailand in 2023 will be 25.5 million. Hope is good, but being realistic is more important." 

Again I urge those who are watching this video, go check out that article in detail, a lot of insight in there especially on the Thai Manufacturing Sector, how it sort of interacts with the Tourism Sector and how both of these things interact with the overall economy and their components as part of overall GDP; really interesting insights. 

Long story short, do I necessarily agree that the Thai economy cannot exist on tourist money alone? Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I think tourism, especially in the foreign community especially ex-pats, immigrants that live here, folks that have moved here and sort of long-term tourists and things or people that come here frequently, I think they think that tourism is far bigger a component of GDP than it actually is now. That said, it's 20% of GDP. We have gone over those numbers, I cited back at the beginning I think of '22 or '21 where the tourism sector was literally decimated, it was brought down orders of magnitude down to 1/10^th of what it was prior to quarter one of 2020. That had a tremendous negative impact on the economy but at the end of the day, Thailand's economy is not wholly based on tourism and in fact again I think foreigners often think tourism is a far larger component of the overall GDP than it actually is. Manufacturing for example is a substantial component of GDP and not something that should be overlooked.

At the end of the day though I truly hope that in 2023 we do see 25, 26, 27 million tourists the way that it is being discussed right now. Hopefully if that does occur, I think that will only be a good thing for Thailand although that being said being economically prudent moving forward, seems like a good course of action just in general.