KUALA LUMPUR: Malaysia has been named as the second-friendliest country in Asia and 15th globally, a survey finds.
The survey, which was done by finance website Insider Monkey, saw Malaysia score a rating of 2.20, surpassing that of its nearest neighbour, Singapore, which ranked fifth, while the United Arab Emirates took the top spot.
According to the survaey, Malaysia also ranks as the 16th most immigrant-friendly country in the world.
"This, as the country comes with a migrant stock population of 10.7 per cent.
"HSBC has listed Malaysia as the 25th best country for expat living and 26 million tourists travelled to Malaysia in 2023, aided by a high visa acceptance rate.
"According to the Passport Index 2024, Malaysia is the fourth most welcoming country in the world in terms of visa on arrival and electronic travel authorisation entry offered to travelling passengers," it said.
According to Insider Monkey, the friendliest countries in Asia were ranked after considering four sources, namely Yahoo Finance, HSBC's Expat Explorer, Passport Index's Welcoming Countries Rank 2024 and Insider Monkey's articles on 30 Friendliest Countries in the World and 20 Most Immigrant Friendly Countries In The World.
"We observed where every Asian country ranked on each of these lists and assigned them scores by dividing their rank on each list by the total number of countries ranked on those lists.
"Scores were then aggregated to determine overall scores for each country."
Earlier, it was reported that Tourism Malaysia is confident of achieving 27.3 million foreign tourist arrivals this year due to several supporting factors, including the government's charter flight matching grant incentive, Visa Liberalisation programme and increasing tourism promotion activities abroad.
Its director-general, Datuk Dr Ammar Abd Ghapar, said this comes after the country had seen the arrival of more than 20 million foreign tourists, surpassing the targeted 19.1 million tourist arrivals.