@MartiInMexico: Good questions. Piqued my curiosity. So I looked up the source report:
The HSBC Bank International Expat Explorer Survey 2009First, the slogan of the HSBC Bank: "We provide offshore banking for customers in over 200 countries and territories." (That's pretty much the whole planet. They might have done better to say where they did
not provide offshore banking.) "We launched this survey to help us better understand the needs of our many customers who live and work abroad."
My overall impression is that the HSBC Bank Expat Survey is more of a marketing tool to use in press releases to get their name before potential clients than any attempt at rigorous analysis.
HSBC vaunts this second annual survey as "the largest independent global survey of expats.... [M]ore than 3,100 expats ... from four continents described the opportunities and challenges they experience living away from home...."
They define an expatriate as "someone over the age of 18 years old who is currently living away from their home country (country of origin)".
To be included, a country had to have 30 or more respondents. Although the Canadian Press summary article gave the number of countries included as 26, in the report itself that number did not appear until page 14.
They did not give the breakdown by sex for "finding love" — even though they did collect data by sex. Sex-specific information appeared only once that I saw: "Male expats also tend to live abroad for longer than their female counterparts, with two-thirds (63%) of men versus 46% of women having lived abroad for more than five years...."
But the survey did report some interesting findings about expats and relationships:
"Those earning less are also more likely to find love, with expats earning less than $60,000 more likely to find love abroad than any other group – over a quarter of expats in this group. Similarly, expats over the age of 55 will have greater chances at finding their life partner – one in four expats around the world aged 55 and over have found love or a life partner whilst living abroad."
Sounds as though, for those of us over 55, it's better to be abroad if you're looking for a partner. I'd like to see the breakdown by country on that, because I doubt that the English-speaking regions of Canada would differ much from the American statistics.
The province of Québec, by contrast, is known for being a better than average place for finding romance at any age, if you speak French. (Outside Montréal, the population is 95% French-speaking, and probably fewer than a quarter of those are bilingual to any extent.)
@Tess57: I've spent a few weeks in Thailand, and the women there
were beautiful, second in S.E. Asia only to Cambodians, IMHO (based on hearsay and a very small sample). Thai women are easy-going and always smiling, for one thing.
I'd nominate Québec women as the most attractive in North America, though they smile about as much as rural Minnesota women do in February. Temperamentally they're far more reserved than women from France, to the point that you'd never guess they had a common heritage going back 400 years.
Voilà! My two centavos. Hope you had as much fun with it as I did....
