Taiwan ranks fourth-best place for expats: survey

COMMUNICATION:While Taiwan remained in the top five, it fell from the top spot in last year’s survey, with language skills one of the factors behind the drop

Staff writer, with CNA, Brussels

Taiwan was ranked the fourth-best place for expatriates to live and work, behind Bahrain, Costa Rica and Mexico, according to an annual survey of top destinations for expatriates published by InterNations, the world’s largest Web site that serves expatriates.

While Taiwan remained among the top five places for expatriates in this year’s report, called Expat Insider, it fell from its top spot in last year’s report.

In last year’s survey, Taiwan, Malta and Ecuador were the top three destinations for expatriates, but they all slipped down the rankings this year.

Taiwan remained ahead of New Zealand, Singapore, Germany, Switzerland and Austria, which are generally considered to offer a good quality of life, the Taipei Economic and Culture Office in Austria cited the report as saying.

In this year’s survey, Taiwan came second in the Quality of Life index — one of the five individual indices that make up the survey — and was first in the health and wellbeing category of that index because of its world-class healthcare and infrastructure.

Other categories in the Quality of Life index include leisure options, with Taiwan ranking 20th; personal happiness, 24th; travel and transport, 6th; and safety and security, 15th, the survey showed.

As for the four other indices, Taiwan ranked as the 19th-best destination on the Ease of Settling In index for expatriates, 12th in the Working Abroad index, 13th in the Family Life index and 14th in the Personal Finance index.

In the Ease of Settling In index, Taiwan placed 46th in the language skills category, which Business Insider said was a key reason for the fall in the nation’s overall score in the index.

The report compared 65 destinations to see how these countries and areas were rated by their expatriate residents. It looked at more than 40 individual factors that influence an expatriate’s experience of living in a foreign country, from family life to finances.

Conducted from February to March, the survey asked nearly 13,000 expatriates about their quality of life to get the results.

Portugal, New Zealand, Malta, Cambodia, Singapore and Spain round up the top 10 expatriate destinations, the survey showed.

At the bottom of the survey were Turkey (No. 56), India (No. 57), Qatar (No. 58), Ukraine (No. 59), Italy (No. 60), Saudi Arabia (No. 61), Brazil (No. 62), Nigeria (No. 63), Kuwait (No. 64) and Greece (No. 65).

China ranked 55th, while South Korea and Hong Kong took 31st and 39th respectively.

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