Expat Destinations: The Top Countries for 2017
Though there’s consistency in the bottom 3, the warm welcome in Bahrain, Costa Rica, and Mexico sees them knock 2016’s winners off the podium.
Methodology
For the country ranking, survey participants were asked to rate 43 different aspects of life abroad on a scale of one to seven. The rating process emphasized the respondents’ personal satisfaction with these aspects and considered both emotional topics such as the friendliness of the local population as well as more factual aspects (e.g. affordability of healthcare) with equal weight.
The respondents’ ratings of the individual factors were then bundled in various combinations for a total of 16 subcategories, and their mean values used to draw up five topical indices. These five indices, as well as the responses to the question: “how satisfied are you with life abroad in general?”, were then averaged in order to rank the 65 countries above.
