Visitors at a near-empty Wat Pho in Bangkok. — Bloomberg
Countries that usually run big trade surpluses in travel services have been devastated by Covid-19.
LIKE a lot of countries in East and Southeast Asia, Thailand has done a pretty spectacular job of controlling the coronavirus pandemic. As of Sept 16, there have been just around 3,490 confirmed cases of the disease, and 58 deaths, in a country of nearly 70 million inhabitants. Its per-capita Covid-19 death toll is less than one-seven-hundredth that of the US.
This hasn’t spared Thailand from an economic downturn that appears to be significantly worse than the one facing its neighbors, or the US. That’s mainly because Thailand’s economy depends heavily on tourists from abroad, whom it has prevented from entering the country since early in the pandemic and is only now beginning to allow back in under extremely restrictive conditions. In a recent analysis of the Covid-19 tourism bust’s impact on the current-account balances of 52 countries, the International Monetary Fund concluded that Thailand will be hit the hardest. Here are the IMF’s estimates for 15 of those countries.
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