Bhutan International tourism, expenditures for travel items (current US$)

Bhutan International tourism, expenditures for travel items (current US$): Key Points

• Here's the shape of it: 42.00M units in 2014, 50.00M units by 2020 for Bhutan's international tourism, expenditures for travel items — up, 19% rise end to end.
• 2015: slips to 40.00M units (-5%).
• 2016-2018: shoots up to 78.00M units (+95%).
• 2019-2020: drops hard to 50.00M units (-36%).
• 2020: The pandemic wipes out tourism here too — 67.00M to 50.00M units (~25%), as border closures froze international travel nearly everywhere.
• By the last year on record, 2020, the figure sits at 50.00M units — 19.0% above 2014.

Why Tourism Collapsed in 2020

Multiple direction changes over the period mean any two-point comparison — say, first year to last — is likely to be misleading on its own. The middle years matter just as much.

This is one of the most universal shocks in any dataset — pandemic border closures halted global tourism almost completely in 2020, and that shows up here too.

A 28% move in 2018 alone is doing a lot of the work in this chart's overall story. Understand that one year and you understand most of what is driving the whole series.

Worth pairing this with the same indicator for a handful of comparable economies before concluding anything about Bhutan specifically — a move that looks large here can be the regional norm, or genuinely unusual, and this chart alone can't say which.

This series reflects Bhutan's official reporting via the linked source. Statistics of this kind are typically benchmarked against periodic censuses or surveys, with intervening years estimated.