I still have every passport that I have ever owned. The older ones are far more interesting because I was younger and always looking for creative ways to travel around the world. The older I get the less interesting my passports get. Now I find it difficult to travel away from my desk at lunch.
Passports are highly symbolic to me. It equals a particular kind of freedom. But I suppose that’s because I have a pretty good passport.
According to the 2018 Henley Passport Index, the Canadian passport is tied for 5th – along with Switzerland, Ireland, and the United States – in terms of the number of countries you can access without a visa. 176 countries in total.
The highest ranking countries this year are Japan and Singapore. With those passports you have visa-free access to 180 countries. The last place country, at 105th, is Afghanistan. You get 24 countries.
Switching to design – because that matters – I think you would be hard-pressed to find better looking ones than the new Norwegian passport (pictured above and set to be put into circulation later this year) and the Swiss passport. The Swiss passport is allegedly the first to be professionally designed.
How does your passport fare on the Passport Index?
Image: Dezeen
Back before the 2008 financial crisis, I did a short stint working for a real estate developer in Dublin, Ireland.
Most of our projects were in Ireland, but our consultant teams were sometimes from all over.
One day we were having a meeting with our architect from Germany and we started talking about a particular project’s green space.
But this wasn’t the sort of green space that was supposed to be actively used. It was a green space that, I guess, you were just supposed to look at and admire for its greenness.
So one of my Irish colleagues asked, while referencing the proposed design: “How are we going to keep people off the grass?”
Our German friends didn’t immediately appreciate the concern and responded with: “What do you mean?”
Irish: “How will we stop people from walking and hanging out on the grass?”
German with serious face: “Oh. We will put up a sign.”
At that point, every Irish person in the room just started laughing and more or less said: “Yeah, that’ll never work.”
Cultural differences can be subtle.
Seeing how we’ve started looking at data from last year, I thought it would be interesting to look at global home prices as of Q4 2015. Here’s a chart from Knight Frank, which they refer to as their Global House Price Index:
At the top of the list is Turkey, with an 18.4% increase from Q4 2014 to Q4 2015. (Supposedly this is because it has recently become easier for foreigners to buy property in the country.) Canada is 13th with a 6.2% increase (during this same time period) and the United States is 17th at 5.4%.
This is obviously a high level analysis. There are lots of regional and local variations within each country. For instance in Canada right now, Calgary is a very different place than, say, Vancouver or Toronto.
Nonetheless, it’s still valuable to see the relative performance of each country and see what their (Knight Frank’s) prediction is for 2016:
“Our outlook for 2016 is muted. We expect the index’s overall rate of growth to be weaker in 2016 than 2015. The global economy is experiencing a potentially dangerous cocktail of low oil prices, a strong [US] dollar and a continued slowdown in China.”
It’s also interesting to see how the countries rank in terms of affordability:
Once again, Canada ranks as being one of the least affordable countries in terms of home prices.