NETWORK Desk – Who are the new rich tourists that everyone would like?
The rapid acquisition of wealth that characterizes the protagonists of this market segment seems to be the search for the direction of capital flows that has marked the last two decades of investments, namely those towards emerging countries, especially highly populated ones. And it is precisely this demographic characteristic that makes the new rich invisible to a superficial macroeconomic analysis. Taking as a reference some countries of the BRICS area, or following the new flow of capital exports, it is recorded that 60% of the millionaires of the entire continent (71,000) reside in South Africa (annual per capita income of USD 5,091.00 in 2020 ) and Bain & Co. argues that approximately 420,000 families live in the country with an income of more than USD 100,000, with a preference for purchasing luxury goods when traveling abroad. Turning to India, according to the World Tourism Organization, the rapid growth of the middle class will lead, within a few years, the number of Indian tourists to exceed 50 million and, according to the Indian Ministry of Tourism, their average spending during the trips will be USD 1,200. Shifting the focus to other major investment recipients over the past 20 years, taking into consideration Thailand’s annual per capita income alone would give a short-sighted view of the real spending power of Thai tourists.
Edmund Terence Gomez’s research seems to put an end to this misunderstanding. In this regard, Gomez reports that about 85% of the local economy is attributable to 10% of the Thai population. It follows that, if the GDP of Thailand (about USD 500 billion) were taken as a reference and divided by 10% of the population (therefore 10% of about 70 million people, or 7 million), we would arrive at a annual per capita income of USD 71,500, or an income (Macro trend data of 2020) about 10% higher than that of Americans (USD 63,544), 36% higher than that of Germans (USD 45,724), about 56% that of Italians (USD 31,676). What goes to corroborate this socio-economic theory is that the new number of wealthy Thais is quite consistent with the data of the Thai Ministry of Tourism which in 2019 identified the number of departures abroad of Thai citizens at about 8 million.
Even more significant would be the number of the new rich in Indonesia if one followed Philippe Lassere’s (i.e. 90% of the country’s wealth belongs to 4% of the population). In this case, we would be facing 10.9 million people with a per capita income of USD 87,000. As for Thailand, also in this case the numbers seem to be consistent with the data of the Indonesian Ministry of Tourism which in 2019 identified the number of departures abroad of Indonesian citizens at about 11 million. Why should a “new rich” South African, Indian, Thai or Indonesian come to San Marino? Based on the aglidic dimension on the analysis of the cultural dimension called uncertainty avoidance, these tourists have a generalized predisposition to know and explore non-traditional tourist destinations; unlike Japanese or American tourists (most of whom, in any case, are not identified by analysts and researchers in the social class of the “new rich”), who prefer to go to known places: Florence, Venice, Rome, Milan.
To make these statistics more interesting and worthy of further analysis is the study of the World Tourism Organization which indicates, as by 2033, 3.4 billion people belonging to the bourgeois class of Asian countries could go abroad for tourism reasons. The RETE Desk carefully studies these groups of socio-economic phenomena, which are reflected in the strategies for attracting the new tourist flows envisaged in its tourism development plan.
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