In May 2011 we appealed to expatriates to participate in the annual HSBC Expat Explorer survey. Today HSBC provided a sneak preview of the full survey results, which will be available in November, and they certainly make for interesting reading.
This year’s survey, which represents the forth year of the expatriate research, was completed by 3,385 expatriates in over 100 countries. According to the expatriates that took part in the research, the best place in the world in which to live is Thailand, with this Asian Land of Smiles scoring the highest marks accord economic and lifestyle factors. Following Thailand was Egypt and Saudi Arabia, in second and third position respectively.
The number of expatriates that participated in the survey entailed that 7 new countries have now being assessed as part of HSBC’s research. These were Turkey, New Zealand, Brazil, Italy, Egypt, Vietnam and Japan. As such, the full analysis that will be released in November 2011 will cover 31 countries around the world.
According to HSBC, a number of emerging trends are prevalent in this year’s Expat Explorer results:
- Expatriates throughout the world remain relatively optimistic about the economic outlook in their host country, even though the global economy continues to exhibit signs of trouble. Although expatriates are optimistic about the economy in their country of residence, only 64% of those surveyed intend to remain in their current country in the future.
- Of those that participated in the survey, 63% claim that they have a higher disposable income in their host country than that they had in their home country. This represents an increase of 7% when compared with the previous year’s results.
- More and more expatriates are finding that language barriers are less of an issue in their host country, with just 27% of those surveyed claiming that language differences create problems. This represents a fall of 3% from the previous year.
- Expatriates appear to be struggling less with homesickness, with just 31% of those surveyed revealing that they feel lonely and miss friends and family, again representing a fall of 3% on the previous year.
The full results will be published by HSBC Expat Explorer in November 2011.
Read the full article: http://www.expatexplorer.hsbc.com/2011surveypreview
