Best countries for Digital Nomads

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In today’s post, we visualize the attractiveness of various countries offering visas to Digital Nomads.

Rise of Digital Nomads

Wikipedia describes Digital nomads as “people who travel freely while working remotely using technology and the internet”

Digital Nomads is a growing trend.

Google searches for “Digital Nomads” term has increased 200% in the last 3 years. Many factors drive this growth such as:

• Improvement in Internet infrastructure & remote collaboration tools

• Rise in acceptance of remote work (normalized greatly by Covid-19)

• General increase in people’s desire for a flexible lifestyle, not centered around their jobs

Rise is nomadic behavior is also creating a sizable impact to AirBnB’s business

While you don’t necessarily have to leave your home country to be a digital nomad, many take this opportunity to go explore the world.

Forward looking governments have launched specific visa categories to attract Digital Nomads to boost their local economies. In 2011, only 21 countries had such visas in place. Now there are more than 40, with more in pipeline.

Most attractive countries for Digital Nomads

So which are the most attractive countries for Digital Nomads?

There are many factors that can influence this choice - weather, proximity to the time zone of your employer (or clients), cost of living etc. In the chart above, we attempt to rank countries on two important criteria:

• Cost of Living Index (lower is better)

• Internet Speed (higher is better) - after all, you will use the Internet a lot as a Digital Nomad

Countries which rank higher on both these dimensions are in East / Southern Europe (e.g. Spain, Portugal, Romania) and in South East / East Asia (Thailand, Taiwan)

Many countries in the Caribbean, Latin America and Eastern Europe are clustered in the bottom left quadrant - low cost of living but relatively poorer internet speeds.

This view doesn’t consider other important factors such as local taxes etc. so please do your own research if you wish to move to any one of these countries to become a digital nomad 😃. NomadGirl is a great place to start.

That’s all for this week. Thanks for reading! 👋