ANALYSIS: The talk of Vietnam surpassing Thailand is everywhere, from Nikkei Asia to Bangkok boardrooms. Here is where the two economies and tourism industries actually stand, why the crown has not changed hands, and where Vietnam has already won.
For years, the idea that Vietnam would one day overtake Thailand felt like a distant hypothetical. In 2026, it has become the region’s most talked-about economic question, debated in Tokyo, Taipei, Hanoi and Bangkok alike.
Nikkei Asia reported in January that Vietnam is on course to surpass Thailand in nominal gross domestic product as early as this year, which would make it Southeast Asia’s third-largest economy behind Indonesia. Thai outlets from Khaosod to The Nation picked up the story within days, while Vietnamese state media has embraced the narrative with enthusiasm.
Vietnam’s economy grew 8.02% in 2025, one of the fastest rates in the world, taking its nominal GDP to around US$514 billion. Hanoi has set a target of 10% annual growth from 2026 to 2030, backed by a state-led infrastructure blitz that includes the new Long Thanh International Airport near Ho Chi Minh City and a China-backed railway in the north. Public investment is set to rise about 26% this year alone, which economists at Vietnam’s BIDV bank estimate could add 1.6 percentage points to growth. Disbursed foreign direct investment hit US$27.6 billion in 2025, the highest in five years.
Thailand’s numbers look modest by comparison, though better than the gloomiest headlines suggest. The economy grew 2.4% in 2025, beating expectations, according to the National Economic and Social Development Council, which has since raised its 2026 forecast to a range of 1.5% to 2.5%. The OECD sits at the bottom of that range with a 1.5% projection, still the slowest pace among major ASEAN economies.
The reality check: Thailand is still ahead
Strip away the projections, however, and Thailand remains the larger economy today, and by a wider margin than the commentary implies.
World Bank data puts Thailand’s nominal GDP at US$577 billion in 2025, against Vietnam’s US$514 billion. That is a gap of more than US$60 billion, roughly the size of Myanmar’s entire economy.
Kristy Hsu, director of the Taiwan ASEAN Studies Center at the Chung-Hua Institution of Economic Research, told a February briefing that Vietnam is unlikely to surpass Thailand this year. Based on IMF data, she calculated that even if Vietnam grew 10% while Thailand managed only 2%, Vietnam would still not close the nominal GDP gap by 2026. Any lead that did emerge, she added, could easily flip back the following year, because nominal GDP rankings are highly sensitive to currency swings.
There is also reason to doubt Hanoi hits its own target. The OECD projects Vietnam’s growth at 6.2% in 2026, well short of the government’s 10% goal, citing a likely export slowdown.
The per-person gap is even clearer. Vietnam’s GDP per capita reached US$5,026 in 2025, according to its National Statistics Office. Thailand’s stood at US$8,201, up from US$7,539 a year earlier, NESDC figures show. Vietnam has just over 100 million people to Thailand’s 66 million, so its larger population does much of the heavy lifting in the headline figure. On average income, productivity and living standards, Thailand remains a full development tier ahead.
The Centre for Economics and Business Research in London takes a longer view. Its World Economic League Table forecasts that Vietnam will pass Thailand after 2028, and by 2035 will reach a GDP of around US$994 billion, overtaking Singapore as well. In other words, the overtake is a question of when, not if. It just has not happened yet.
Where Vietnam has already won: trade
There is one race that is already over. Vietnam’s exports reached US$475 billion in 2025, up 17% from a year earlier, driven by electronics assembled for Samsung, Apple and other multinationals, according to government data reported by Reuters. Thailand’s exports came to US$335.1 billion, a strong year with 12.7% growth, but still US$140 billion behind a country that exported less than Thailand barely a decade ago.
Vietnam’s total trade turnover crossed US$930 billion for the first time, placing it among the world’s 25 largest trading economies. The caveat is dependence: foreign-invested firms account for 77% of Vietnamese exports, meaning much of the boom belongs to Samsung’s supply chain rather than Vietnamese companies. But as a magnet for the factories leaving China, Vietnam has decisively beaten Thailand, whose flagship automotive sector is retreating. Suzuki has exited Thai car production and Honda has scaled back output.
Tourism: Vietnam won the Chinese market, Thailand still wins overall
Vietnam had a record 2025, welcoming 21.2 million international visitors, up 20.4% year on year and nearly 18% above its pre-pandemic peak. Crucially, it overtook Thailand as the top destination for Chinese travellers, drawing 5.3 million against Thailand’s 4.47 million, after Chinese arrivals to Thailand collapsed by roughly 34% amid safety concerns linked to scam centre kidnappings. Hanoi is now targeting 25 million foreign visitors in 2026 and an audacious 50 million by 2030.
Thailand went the other way. Arrivals fell 7.23% to 32.97 million in 2025, the first non-Covid annual decline in years, with Malaysia replacing China as the top source market. Through the first four months of 2026, Thailand recorded about 11.7 million arrivals against Vietnam’s 8.8 million.
Yet the gap that matters is still substantial. Thailand attracted roughly 11 million more visitors than Vietnam in 2025 and remains Southeast Asia’s most visited country and eighth in the world. On money, the picture is similar. Vietnam’s total tourism revenue passed 1 quadrillion dong for the first time, about US$39 billion including domestic travel. Thailand earned 1.53 trillion baht from foreign visitors alone, with total tourism revenue estimated at around 2.6 trillion baht, roughly US$80 billion, when domestic trips are included.
Former TAT governor Yuthasak Supasorn has pointed to the structural reason: Vietnam’s growth remains volume-driven rather than value-driven, with considerable room to lift spending per head. Thailand’s average visitor stays more than nine days and spends around 47,000 baht per trip, supported by a mature long-haul market that delivered over 10 million high-spending travellers in 2025.
Why Vietnam has not overtaken Thailand yet
Several structural gaps explain why the overtake keeps slipping just beyond the horizon.
The first is infrastructure depth. Vietnam’s power grid remains a weak point, with the World Bank estimating the 2023 outages cost US$1.4 billion, or 0.3% of GDP, in lost industrial output. Thailand retains a clear advantage in electricity reliability, logistics and established industrial ecosystems built over four decades.
The second is red tape. BIDV chief economist Can Van Luc has said more than 2,000 investment projects in Vietnam remain stalled by unresolved legal issues, and analysts agree that regulatory reform is the make-or-break condition for sustaining the boom.
The third is institutional maturity. As the EU’s carbon border mechanism takes effect in 2026, Thailand’s more established ESG and carbon accounting frameworks give it a compliance edge that Vietnam, still reliant on foreign firms for emissions tracking, lacks.
In tourism, Vietnam’s supply of hotels, resorts and airports is expanding faster than its brand. Thailand’s global recognition, service depth and repeat-visitor base took half a century to build, and Fortune has noted that Vietnam risks ending up with the opposite problem: abundant infrastructure and not enough guests to fill it if the boom cools.
The uncomfortable part for Thailand
Demographics may be the most unforgiving. Thailand’s median age is 40, against 30 in Vietnam, meaning the Thai workforce is shrinking just as Vietnam’s is entering its most productive years. Household debt stood at 16.44 trillion baht at the end of 2025, or 86.7% of GDP, among the highest in Asia, according to Bank of Thailand data, suffocating the domestic consumption that should be picking up the slack. The new coalition government under Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul, formed after Bhumjaithai’s election win in February, inherits both problems along with the unresolved border tensions with Cambodia.
Thai industry bodies see the danger clearly. The Association of Thai Travel Agents has warned that if Thailand does not adapt within five to ten years, it risks losing Gen Z travellers, digital nomads and the new generation of Chinese tourists to Vietnam. Its prescription is blunt: stop selling visitor numbers, make safety a genuine national agenda, and rebuild tired products around experiences rather than checklists.
The economic maths is equally stark. A country growing at 8% doubles its economy roughly every nine years. A country growing at 2% takes 35. Vietnam does not need to beat Thailand at anything in particular. It simply needs Thailand to keep standing still.
For now, Thailand remains the bigger economy, the bigger tourism market and the wealthier society per person, and its people earn nearly two-thirds more on average. The honest answer to the question of whether Vietnam has overtaken Thailand is not yet, except in exports, where it already has. The honest answer to whether it will overtake in everything else, on current trajectories, is that only Thailand can prevent it.
The story Thailand vs Vietnam in 2026: who’s really winning the economy and tourism race? as seen on Thaiger News.
