Malta tenth-least popular place for expats – InterNations Survey

According to a recent study by InterNations Expat, Malta is the 50th favourite place for expats to live and work – out of a list of 59.

Having come in at 31st out of 64 in the most recent survey, it is a dramatic decline for a country with such a large number of foreign workers in vital sectors such as construction as well as lucrative sectors such as iGaming.

By the end of 2020, according to Finance Minister Clyde Caruana, Malta had nearly 70,000 foreign workers registered to work, representing more than a quarter of Malta’s workforce.

According to the survey, Malta was the 31st most popular country to work abroad, coming in ahead of the likes of the United Kingdom for economic and job security and work and leisure.

This year’s edition of the annual survey gathered the feedback of some 12,420 expats representing 174 nationalities and living in 186 countries or territories.

Participants were asked to rate up to 37 different factors relating to various aspects of expat life, from emotional topics, such as getting used to the local culture, to questions concerning cost of living and salary.

Fellow Mediterranean destinations Turkey (52nd), Cyprus (53rd), Egypt (55th), and Italy (58th) joined Malta in the bottom 10 countries.

While all four received at least average results when it comes to the ease of settling in, expats were particularly dissatisfied with their working life and financial aspects.

Turkey, Cyprus, and Egypt also landed among the bottom 10 in the “Working Abroad Index”, while Turkey’s 44th place out of 59 destinations is the best result in the Personal Finance Index for one of these four destinations.

In Malta, expats were the 51st most satisfied with their finances, though the country came in around the middle of the rankings in terms of quality of life.

In the seven categories contributing to Malta expats’ quality of life, the country scored in the top half of the table in only one – leisure options – where it came 20th.

It scored especially low in expats’ opinions of quality of the environment, where it was 56th, falling below Indonesia, China and Egypt, and in travel and transportation, where it ranked the same.

The survey comes as, in February, EU data revealed that Europeans in Malta were the second most overburdened by housing costs out of their peers across the bloc.