What is the importance of the tourism for the Philippines economy?
Right now tourism accounts for about 6% of our economy, and it employs 10% of our workforce, which corresponds to about 3.5 million people so it is a very important industry, in spite of the fact that the number of visitors is still very low, 3 million a year compared to our neighbors (Indonesia gets 6 millions, Singapore 10 millions, Thailand 15 million and Malaysia 23 millions). We are really far back compared to other South East Asian countries; even Vietnam gets more visitors than us and they have started later. Given that the tourism in the Philippines is attracting less visitors compared to other South East Asian countries, does the Philippines have a competitive advantage compared to its neighbors? We have natural endowments that are better than our South East Asian neighbors. Of course they also have the sun and the sand but if you go to Boracay you will see that the quality of the sand is higher, and the sea here is much clearer than the sea in Thailand because we are in the b
