Thursday, July 4, 2013

The Most and Least Welcoming Countries for Foreigners

The Washington Post and writer Max Fisher published this article based on a World Economic Forum report about the most and least welcoming countries to foreigners. Some of their ratings simply do not make sense to me. Of course, data can always be manipulated. I tend to value personal experience more. What do you think?


Buried several hundred pages into a new World Economic Forum report on global tourism, past the sections on air travel infrastructure and physician density (by which they mean the number of physicians per capita, not the mass-per-cubic-meter of individual doctors), are some very interesting numbers. The WEF has compiled survey data from 140 countries estimating the attitude of each countries’ population toward foreign visitors.

The results, mapped out above, seem significant beyond just tourism. Red countries are less welcoming to foreign visitors, according to the data; blue countries are more welcoming. Click the map (or here) to enlarge the image. The WEF gathered the data from late 2011 through late 2012 by asking respondents, “How welcome are foreign visitors in your country?”

The WEF explains that the survey results are meant to help “measure the extent to which a country and society are open to tourism and foreign visitors.”

According to the data, the top three most welcoming countries for foreigners are, in order: Iceland, New Zealand and Morocco. Other high-ranking countries include the rich and peaceful of the Western world (Ireland, Canada, Austria), a few tourist havens (Thailand, United Arab Emirates), and, for some reason, big parts of West Africa.

The three countries least welcoming to foreigners are, in order: Bolivia, Venezuela and Russia. Other poorly ranked countries include the more troubled states of the greater Middle East (Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia), Eastern Europe and two East Asian states I was very surprised to see so near the bottom: China and South Korea.

See the full article at The Washington Post

2 comments:

  1. Canada? Welcoming? not at the border with detroit. extremely rude ,bigotted and unpleasant border officials going into canada and the opposite coming back; not only my personal experience but the same for many non whites that have shared thier unpleasant experiences there.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Sorry that you had a bad experience entering Canada. I'm curious as to how you were treated within the country?

    ReplyDelete

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