Has Vietnam's GDP Overtaken Thailand? Yes, and Not Yet

[Has Vietnam's GDP Overtaken Thailand? Yes, and Not Yet]

Measured by purchasing power parity, Vietnam's economy overtakes Thailand's this year. Measured in nominal US dollars, it does not happen until 2029. And by either measure, Vietnam's income per person is still only about 60% of Thailand's.

Two versions of the "Vietnam overtakes Thailand" story have circulated in Vietnam this year. In late April, an official at Vietnam's statistics office told local media that, on a purchasing-power basis, Vietnam had already passed Thailand in 2025, by roughly 40 billion. In late August, Vietnamese financial media ran the numbers again and concluded the crossover would come around 2029. Both claims draw on the same source, the IMF's April World Economic Outlook. They differ only in the yardstick.

The first yardstick is purchasing power parity, or PPP. A dollar buys more in Vietnam than in Thailand, so PPP strips out that price gap before comparing output. The result is expressed in "international dollars," not actual US dollars, and the IMF publishes both measures side by side. On the IMF's April projections, Vietnam was still slightly behind Thailand on PPP in 2025 and moves ahead in 2026, at about 2.03 trillion international dollars against Thailand's 1.96 trillion. That makes Vietnam the second-largest of the six major ASEAN economies, behind only Indonesia (the order is Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore). Vietnam's statistics office, using its own national data, puts the 2025 figure a little higher than the IMF does and therefore counts the overtaking as already done last year. Either way, both sets of numbers show Vietnam ahead in 2026. When Vietnamese media call the country "ASEAN's second-largest economy," this is the measure they mean.

The second yardstick is nominal GDP in US dollars, meaning each country's output converted at the year's exchange rate. Most international rankings use this measure. On the two governments' own 2025 figures, Vietnam's GDP was USD 514 billion and Thailand's USD 577 billion, leaving Thailand USD 63 billion ahead. The IMF's estimate for Vietnam's 2025 GDP is about USD 20 billion lower than the statistics office's, and from that starting point it has Vietnam closing the gap year by year and passing Thailand in 2029. Vietnam's statistics office gets there sooner, as early as 2027, but only if the economy grows 10% a year for five years, faster than the 8% it managed in 2025, and if the dong depreciates only modestly.

Exchange rates explain why the two yardsticks disagree, and 2025 shows how much they matter. Vietnam grew 8% that year against Thailand's 2.4%, so the gap should have narrowed. In dollar terms it widened instead, from USD 53 billion in 2024 to USD 63 billion. The reason is the Thai baht, which gained more than 8% against the dollar in 2025, its biggest rise in four years. The same baht-denominated output simply converted into more dollars. Kristy Hsu, director of the Taiwan ASEAN Studies Center at the Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research, ran the numbers in a February interview: on IMF data, even if Vietnam grew 10% this year and Thailand only 2%, Vietnam would still be below Thailand in 2026. And if Vietnam does pull ahead in some year, it could slip back the next, with currency moves one of the variables.

Both yardsticks compare totals, not what each person gets. Vietnam has just over 100 million people to Thailand's roughly 66 million, and population is what lets its total output catch up. In 2025, Vietnam's GDP per capita was USD 5,026 against Thailand's USD 8,201, about 60%. Voices inside Vietnam make the same point. Nguyễn Anh Vũ, a finance scholar at Ho Chi Minh City University of Banking, has said that passing Thailand on PPP does not mean Vietnam's economy has overtaken Thailand's overall, and that living standards should be judged on per-capita figures.

So could Hanoi's 10% growth target bring the crossover forward? The Communist Party's 14th National Congress in January set a target of at least 10% average annual growth for 2026 to 2030. Actual growth in the first half of this year was 8.18%, faster than a year earlier but short of the target. Thailand grew less than 2% in the second quarter, and its full-year forecast was raised only to a little above 2%, so the growth gap has not narrowed. The IMF projected 7.1% growth for Vietnam in April and raised that to 7.5% in July, but the July update only revised growth rates. The full dollar GDP projections will not be updated until the October World Economic Outlook, and that is when it will become clear whether the crossover moves earlier than 2029.

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