Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing long-term expats and sort of their contribution to the economy of Thailand. I thought of making this video after reading a recent comment on our channel, quoting directly: "It looks like yet again badly thought out solutions to problems caused by generally bad visitors are seriously impacting long-term expats who are a large source of foreign income to Thailand." 

My question sort of posed is: "Are long-term expats a large source of foreign income?" I would say yes but I would say it's a bit more nuanced than I think many people take into consideration. So one, for years it was very interesting sort of pre-deep dive-able internet, where you could get really detailed information and long before frankly I knew the details of what it was to be here in Thailand; I would hear expats all the time here in Thailand kind of sit around opining on how without the expats bringing in money, Thailand would have all sorts of economic problems. I just never really, just sort of looking around, never thought, it just didn't ring true to me completely. It's clear and for example, Foreign Direct Investment into Thailand and foreign nationals, myself included, who came here and started businesses, yeah they certainly contribute to Thailand, there's no doubt about that. Immigrants contribute to every economy that they come into, that they are welcomed by and they are allowed to operate in. So yeah there is a certain level of a benefit derived by having immigrants in a given country. I want to be clear, I view there being a difference between immigrants and expats. Expats kind of come in, may stay for a while but sort of the presumption is they are going to leave, that's always how I viewed expats as opposed to Immigrants. I consider myself an Immigrant, I immigrated to Thailand, stayed and became Thai. Still here doing these videos, doing this video right now. 

So my point is though we did the analysis back during COVID of how much of the Tourism Sector was lost and at that time we figured about 18%, 18 - 20% of overall GDP in Thailand came from tourism and I think that is probably a fair assessment. Of that number of tourists, you are going to have a low subset that become actual expats, that end up moving here full time although I would argue probably that percentage is higher compared to many other countries. There's a large percentage of people that start off as tourists in Thailand, love it and then say “hey man I want to live here”, and they do, and we see a lot of retirees for example that do that. Very hard to quantify this. I am not going to sit here and say oh it's a huge number, a load, I suspect it's bigger than even I think it is, depending on how you would tabulate it but yet again like with tourism and I remember for years people talked about that "oh well tourism, that is all the Thai economy, if they don't have tourism, wheels would fall off the wagon." Well we did three years without tourism effectively and yeah it wasn't good and I have railed about that in many videos there's no doubt, but the country survived. I mean there is an economy here other than the tourism economy and other than the economy that is sort of centred around the Expat Community.

So again, do I think it's sort of the end all be all of money coming into Thailand? Not necessarily. Is it a substantial and important sector of the economy that should be looked at? Yeah absolutely, so take it for what it's worth.