Tourism to Burma: Statistics Revisited

Submitted by Christoph Amthor on August 4, 2011 – 8:45 pm

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:

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.

photo: matt.hintsa