World visa policy statistics

I downloaded data from https://visamap.co/, which is open-source, and combined it with my existing borders data set to see which countries have open visa policies versus closed visa policies.

When we compare the total number of countries that offer visa-free access, a pattern appears that linear models fail to capture. The overall score is the democracy score from the Economist Intelligence Unit. We notice three distinct groups:

1. Most authoritarian states (score under 2) allow very few, if any, nationalities to travel to their country visa-free.
2. Moderately authoritarian and hybrid regimes (scores between 2 and 6) are random.
3. Democratic states (scores above 6) allow over 50 countries to visit visa free, are former British colonies, or are Indonesia, Timor-Leste, and Cabo Verde.

This pattern continues when we look at press freedom. Lower is better.

Every country with a high press score over 20 allows at least 92 nationalities to visit visa-free or was a British colony. Countries with a mediocre press freedom score between 20 and 60 run the gamut. Every country with poor press freedom or a score over 60 allows fewer than 50 countries to visit visa-free.

I find the same trend with corruption.

When we color countries by color, almost every country outside the Anglosphere has a pretty open visa policy.

If we look only at high-income economies with a GDP per capita over $20,000, we find the following:

Saudi Arabia is the only high-income country based on GDP per capita that is not a former British colony that allows fewer than 70 nationalities to visit visa-free, defined as no ESTA, no pre-registration, no fee, just show up)

AP is Asia-Pacific, WE/EU is Western Europe, AME is America, and MENA is the Middle East.

Changing our GDP per capita threshold to $10,000 USD does not change much.

Now using GDP per capita as a metric, we find the following:

Here is a correlation matrix of these variables:

	Visa free	GDP per capita	Overall Score	pfi 2018	CPI score 2021
Visa free	1.000000	0.242916	0.471483	-0.426294	0.418883
GDP per capita	0.242916	1.000000	0.582065	-0.385813	0.785735
Overall Score	0.471483	0.582065	1.000000	-0.773814	0.752546
pfi 2018	-0.426294	-0.385813	-0.773814	1.000000	-0.583441
CPI score 2021	0.418883	0.785735	0.752546	-0.583441	1.000000

As we can see, while no one metric by itself explains why a country would choose to have a more open or closed visa policy, two questions can quickly narrow the likely number of policies:

• Is your country democratic?
• Were you not a British colony at any point in your history?

If you answered yes to all three of these questions, you probably have a liberal visa policy. We can now sort the world into eight buckets: The first number is the number of countries, the second is the average number of countries that can travel to a given country visa-free.

• GDP per capita high (over $20k)
  • Former British colony
    • Democratic: (9, 92.0)
    • Not democratic: (4, 48.0)
  • Not a former British colony
    • Democratic: (18, 103.0)
    • Not democratic: (1,6.0)
• GDP per capita low
  • Former British colony
    • Democratic: (19, 65.0)
    • Not democratic: (14, 10.0)
  • Not a former British colony:
    • Democratic: (46,103.0)
    • Not democratic: (45,20.0)

So, based on my graphing, this doesn’t show what I expected. Let’s reverse our methodology and instead test whether a country is a former British colony.

• GDP per capita over $20k
  • No visa for over 50 nationalities
    • Democratic (score over 5)
      • Not a British colony: 18
      • Former British colony: 5
    • Not democratic
      • Former British colony: 2 (UAE & Qatar)
  • Closed visa
    • Democratic
      • Former British colony: 4 (Australia, Canada, NZ, US)
    • Not democratic
      • Former British colony: 2 (Bahrain and Kuwait)
      • Not a British colony: 1 (Saudi Arabia)
• GDP per capita under $20,000
  • No visa for over 50 nationalities
    • Democratic
      • Not a British colony: 40
      • Former British colony: 12
    • Not democratic
      • Not a British colony: 15
      • Former British colony: 2 (Oman and Zambia)
  • Closed visa
    • Democratic
      • Former British colony: 7
      • Not a British colony: 6
    • Not democratic
      • • Not a British colony: 30
        • Former British colony: 12

What we see here is that if you are not a former British colony and democratic, you are likely open to tourists from most countries visiting visa-free. Rich democratic former British colonies, on the other hand, maintain strict visa policies.

One more way to visualize this data. To be considered English-speaking, over 50% of your population needs to speak English as a first language by this definition.

• Democracy Score over 5
  • Open visa
    • GDP per capita over $20k
      • English speaking
        • Former British colony: 1
        • Not a British colony: 1
      • Not English speaking
        • Not a British colony: 17
        • Former British colony: 4
    • GDP per capita under $20k
      • Not English speaking
        • Not a British colony: 40
        • Former British colony: 12
  • Closed visa
    • GDP per capita over $20k
      • English speaking
        • Former British colony: 4
    • GDP per capita under $20k
      • Not English speaking
        • Former British colony: 7
        • Not a British colony: 6
• Democracy Score under 5
  • Open visa
    • GDP per capita over $20k
      • Not English speaking
        • Former British colony: 2
    • GDP per capita under $20k
      • Not English speaking
        • Not a British colony: 15
          • Former British colony: 2
  • Closed visa
    • GDP per capita over $20k
      • Not English speaking
        • Former British colony: 2
        • Not a British colony: 1
    • GDP per capita under $20k
      • Not English speaking
        • Not a British colony: 30
        • Former British colony: 12

So from this, we can clearly see the factors that matter in whether a country will have a more open visa policy:

1. Be Democratic.
2. Don’t be a former British colony.

Income has little impact on visa policy.

Very few other raw data metrics correlate so well with a highly democratic society. Most of the proxies we use are not raw data. The press freedom index and corruption perceptions index are useful, but they are themselves interpretations of data done by non-profits.

I love the metric of counting how many countries can travel visa-free to a given country because no interpretation or aggregation is necessary. You either can show up at the airport with your passport from an international flight and go through customs for free, or you can’t. There is no middle ground.

The best raw data metric for determining whether a country is democratic is whether people from democracies can travel visa-free to that country.

I will write a second article on this topic, counting eVisas as visa-free.