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There are several sources that make a claim like that, I'm giving some of them:

I'm aware that Thailand is well known as a sex tourism country, but, even so, I find that for prostitution to make up 10% of its GDP it would be an extremely humongous phenomenon there.

Laurel
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user2638180
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    Your first claim says that the _tourism industry_ is 10%, which may be more credible (though still exaggerated) – pipe Mar 19 '23 at 00:08
  • @pipe, I find the first claim to be ambiguous, not sure if "which" refers just to "tourism industry" or "the backbone of the tourism industry", anyway the other 2 claims make clear that 10% is just for the sex industry. Due to that, I think the first one also refers to 10% being generated by sex industry, but it has been written in an ambiguous way. – user2638180 Mar 19 '23 at 10:03
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    @pipe 10% seems too low; before the COVID-19 pandemic, [it was more in the order of 20%](https://www.statista.com/statistics/1143467/thailand-share-of-tourism-to-gdp/). – gerrit Mar 20 '23 at 10:11
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    @gerrit the only statistic available on your link shows 65%, and [this page](https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/rankings/international_tourism_revenue_to_GDP/) shows about 3%. – Weather Vane Mar 20 '23 at 12:25
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    @WeatherVane Hm? I see a graph that shows 17.5% for three years, then (2020) it drops to ~5%. – gerrit Mar 20 '23 at 14:45
  • @WeatherVane That page only covers *international* tourism. The tourism industry in general and prostitution in particular also includes a domestic component. – gerrit Mar 20 '23 at 14:48
  • EU countries aren't too skittish to try to estimate this https://www.imf.org/en/Data/Statistics/informal-economy-data/Reports/ECB-Estimation-of-prostitution-services-in-Europe-in-the-context-of-the-external-accounts but I think Thailand would be. So it's doubtful you'd get much better data. – Fizz Mar 20 '23 at 17:00

1 Answers1

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This difficult to estimate even in developed countries. Best I could find for East Asia, in general, is this from the ILO, from 1998 (duh!):

The sex sector in the four countries [Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines and Thailand] is estimated to account for anywhere from 2 to 14 per cent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), and the revenues it generates are crucial to the livelihoods and earnings potential of millions of workers beyond the prostitutes themselves.

[...] In Thailand, for example, close to US$300 million is transferred annually to rural families by women working in the sex sector in urban areas, a sum that in many cases exceeds the budgets of government-funded development programmes. For the 1993-95 period, the estimate was that prostitution yielded an annual income of between US$22.5 and 27 billion.

The GDP of Thailand was about $200 billion back then (in 2015 dollars), so 10% doesn't seem outlandish. In fact it was probably more, percentage wise, in 1995 dollars.

Another press article, also from 1999 says

A study by a Thai university estimated the sex sector at around $25 billion, or 12% of the country's gross domestic product.

There are no other [relevant] details, but I suspect it's referring to the same dataset.

Wikipedia says

In 2015 Havocscope said that about US$6.4 billion in annual revenue was being generated by the trade, a figure which accounted for 10 percent of Thailand's GDP. Havocscope says that sex workers in Thailand send an annual average of US$300 million to family members who reside in more rural areas of Thailand.

So I suspect that's where the newer claims come from. The original article cited by Wikipedia doesn't load for me. And given that it's dropping the same US$300 figure as the much older ones, I suspect the actual data is the same, and probably just extrapolated i.e. carried forward.

Fizz
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    FWTW, a newer study in South Korea (2013) puts the figure there at 1.66% of their GDP https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8wk7r6qz – Fizz Mar 20 '23 at 17:50