La Vida Passport Rankings 2024 Show Surprise Country Winners and Losers

LONDON, England, January 4, 2024 (Newswire.com) - La Vida’s passport rankings for 2024 reveal some surprise winners and losers. Based on visa-free access to global wealth, the rankings are particularly relevant for business travelers needing a strong passport to ease travel. Top for 2024 is San Marino, providing access to an astonishing 96.1% of global wealth as measured by the GDP of each country. It is followed closely by Singapore and Japan.

Notable countries include the UK in the 38th spot reaching 80.3% and the USA in the 42nd place reaching 79.3%. Many of the top 30 slots are taken by countries in Europe, emphasizing the strength of European passports in general. The UK and USA lie behind small European countries such as Slovakia and Latvia in terms of passport strength.

At the bottom end of the scale, the report picks up some glaring weaknesses with several countries that would be considered high-trade global exporters. But any business person from these countries looking to travel for trade internationally is often left frustrated in applying for visas wherever they choose to go. Normal passport rankings based simply on number of countries may overlook the weakness in the likes of Bangladesh, Nigeria and Pakistan with access to around 50 countries each visa-free or one-quarter of worldwide countries. But delve deeper on the quality or size and attraction of those destinations and it becomes clear that the passports for those three countries are almost worthless for visa-free travel. Pakistan and Nigeria are able to access just 2.2% and 2.1% of global wealth and in rankings lie in the bottom six passports worldwide, just behind Syria and North Korea. Bangladesh does a little better at 3.5%, lying 10^th from the bottom worldwide.

La Vida's wealth passport ranking is a sophisticated measure of the power or strength of a passport based on the countries it has visa-free access to.

While other passport rankings look purely at the number of destinations, the La Vida report is unique in analyzing the quality of visa-free access based on the size of the destination country's GDP. It analyses the GDP (or wealth) of each country to which the passport has visa-free access, combining the data to provide an overall percentage score. That is the percentage of global GDP or wealth that the country's passport provides visa-free access to for its citizens.

Several countries offer citizenship by investment programmes and these countries often have strong passports with good visa-free access. Many of our clients look to invest in these programmes to enhance their existing travel possibilities.

Contact La Vida for further details or visit www.goldenvisas.com/passport-ranking-wealth-2024 for full rankings and details on all 199 countries.

Source: La Vida