This paper has described the situation of Thai tourism and its role in the economy of the country.It can be seen that the importance of Thai tourism has increased. The tourism sector has played a significant role in economic expansion. Therefore, researchers have argued that most developing countries use the tourism sector strategically in developing the national economy. As a result, there exists a large amount of literature that has tried to appraise the role of tourism in the economy. This paper also has reviewed an extensive amount of literature examining the relationship between tourism development and economic growth.
However, in the case of Thailand, the results may lead to a possible policy implication that tourism may not be the main factor driving economic development. Therefore, the Thai government should pay attention to promoting other sectors in addition to tourism to expand economic growth. A careful empirical analysis, such as was applied in the examples discussed in this paper, is desirable for any country that may want to focus on the tourism industry as part of its national economic development policy. Considering methodology issues, some doubts have been cast on the appropriateness of model specification and the omission of important variables in previous studies. Thus, more future research incorporating other feasible variables is needed for model validation. Such possible variables could include the size of the national economy, the level of openness of the country as well as the level of travel restrictions, the degree of dependence on tourism, the tourism destination life cycle, and the level of economic development. In addition, researchers may compare multiple countries using the above variables as intervening factors between economic development and tourism activity and may then be able to draw a concrete conclusion regarding tourism-led economic growth theory.