Never trust any statistics that you didn’t forge yourself, as the saying goes. Usually, you can do some nice tweaks by switching between absolute or relative numbers.
These thoughts came to my mind when I saw a table on Wikipedia that shows a ranking of tourists ordered by the country of origin. While it might tell you a lot about economic impact, I really don’t understand why to group tourists by country unless you want to make conclusions about the mentality, the specialization of outgoing tour operators or the mobility in the respective country. But then you would be advised to look at the ratio, not the total numbers. Otherwise, you simply end up with the banal fact that large countries are more likely to bring about large numbers – like more gold medals, more Nobel Prizes, or more criminals. The same, of course, applies to the number of tourists.
So I recalculated the ranking by relating the number of travelers to the total number of the population. Here is the result:
These thoughts came to my mind when I saw a table on Wikipedia that shows a ranking of tourists ordered by the country of origin. While it might tell you a lot about economic impact, I really don’t understand why to group tourists by country unless you want to make conclusions about the mentality, the specialization of outgoing tour operators or the mobility in the respective country. But then you would be advised to look at the ratio, not the total numbers. Otherwise, you simply end up with the banal fact that large countries are more likely to bring about large numbers – like more gold medals, more Nobel Prizes, or more criminals. The same, of course, applies to the number of tourists.
So I recalculated the ranking by relating the number of travelers to the total number of the population. Here is the result:
Old Rank | New Rank | Ratio Total/Population | Country | Amount | % Total | Population | (updated) | ||
by total | by ratio | in ‰ | Male | Female | Total | ||||
12 | 1 | 1,12 | Singapore | 3361 | 2309 | 5670 | 2.61% | 5,076,700 | 2010 |
1 | 2 | 0,78 | Thailand | 19637 | 29874 | 49511 | 22.83% | 63,878,267 | 2010 |
14 | 3 | 0,55 | Switzerland | 2155 | 2183 | 4338 | 2.00% | 7,866,500 | 2010 estimate |
6 | 4 | 0,48 | Malaysia | 7865 | 5423 | 13288 | 6.13% | 27,565,821 | 2010 |
11 | 5 | 0,32 | Taiwan | 4740 | 2612 | 7352 | 3.39% | 23,174,528 | 2011 estimate |
5 | 6 | 0,28 | South Korea | 8189 | 5272 | 13461 | 6.21% | 48,875,000 | 2010 estimate |
17 | 7 | 0,22 | Belgium | 1228 | 1205 | 2433 | 1.12% | 11,007,020 | 2011 estimate |
4 | 8 | 0,20 | France | 6783 | 6701 | 13484 | 6.22% | 65,821,885 | 2011 estimate |
15 | 9 | 0,19 | Australia | 2383 | 1846 | 4229 | 1.95% | 22,669,391 | 2011 estimate |
21 | 10 | 0,14 | Israel | 548 | 502 | 1050 | 0.48% | 7,746,000 | 2011 estimate |
19 | 11 | 0,13 | Netherlands | 1222 | 1017 | 2239 | 1.03% | 16,686,800 | 2011 estimate |
10 | 12 | 0,13 | Italy | 3732 | 3933 | 7665 | 3.53% | 60,642,308 | 2010 estimate |
7 | 13 | 0,12 | Germany | 5315 | 4647 | 9962 | 4.59% | 81,799,600 | 2010 estimate |
13 | 14 | 0,08 | United Kingdom | 3156 | 2047 | 5203 | 2.40% | 62,262,000 | 2010 estimate |
8 | 15 | 0,07 | Japan | 6373 | 2874 | 9247 | 4.26% | 127,960,000 | 2011 estimate |
20 | 16 | 0,05 | Canada | 1073 | 785 | 1858 | 0.86% | 34,538,000 | 2011 estimate |
9 | 17 | 0,03 | United States | 5024 | 3717 | 8741 | 4.03% | 308,745,538 | 2010 |
3 | 18 | 0,02 | China | 18986 | 3885 | 22871 | 10.55% | 1,339,724,852 | 2010 |
18 | 19 | 0,02 | Russia | 1137 | 1221 | 2358 | 1.09% | 142,905,208 | 2010 |
22 | 20 | 0,01 | Bangladesh | 821 | 128 | 949 | 0.44% | 142,300,000 | 2011 estimate |
23 | 21 | 0,00 | Pakistan | 318 | 111 | 429 | 0.20% | 170,600,000 | 2011 estimate |
16 | 22 | 0,00 | India | 2097 | 688 | 2785 | 1.28% | 1,210,193,422 | 2011 |
2 | N/A | N/A | Other countries1 | 14425 | 13313 | 27738 | 12.79% | N/A |
Notably, some small or medium size countries jumped up while bigger ones fell down in ranking.
I find particularly interesting that Switzerland ranks among Burma’s ASEAN neighbors and that Belgium and France rank much higher than the traditional countries of outgoing tourism like Germany, the United Kingdom or Japan. China, India and probably Russia as well simply don’t have that high a percentage of people traveling abroad as tourists.
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