Tuesday, February 21, 2006

The world's favourite nation

Apparently we are the most liked nation in the world. Despite our various military ventures and despite, or possibly in some quarters because of, our imperial past when ranked on politeness, culture, education, quality of investment environment, as a tourist destination etc. etc. we come out as the nation people most like. This result is true on all sorts of criteria and across huge swathes of the world.

The press release from the pollster contains dollar valuations of national brands which have to contain a fair bit of arbitrary information but the sample is very large and reasonably broad although presumably biased towards those with Internet access. These results provide additional evidence for one explanation of part of Britain's relative economic success recently. We do well out of being a place where lots of highly skilled and talented people want to live, they bring money and achievement with them. The Mittals, Abramovichs and Madonnas of this world are an extreme example of a trend which has been of huge benefit to Britain.

1 comment:

Dave Cole said...

I would be fascinated to see if there are any regional variations in the measure. I would think that Britons would be thought of very poorly on the Costa del Sol, Ibiza and so on where 'we' tend to go and inebriate ourselves with, ahem, unfortunate consequences.

It is also worth noting that the article says 'they were also rated the most boring'.

xD.