Day after day the world becomes more connected than it has ever been pushing general living and working trends to adapt very quickly. In particular, post-Brexit and post-Covid, remote employment has greatly contributed to boosting global connectivity lately. While more and more people choose to become digital nomads and be able to work from any place around the globe, the popularity of remote work will only be growing. Besides, a lot of businesses today have policies that allow their staff to work remotely as well as independent contractors create their own arrangements that suit their needs, whether it be a home office, cafés, or other locations.
There are already a ton of statistics on which countries benefit the most from remote labor. But regardless of the number of people who actually work remotely, The Happy Beavers wanted to go deeper into this, so they looked at which countries show the greatest interest in remote work relative to their populations.
For this, the Happy Beavers looked at Google searches from the fourth quarter of 2022 in 72 different countries, including both English- and locally-relevant search phrases. The search terms used ranged from general ones like “remote work” to more targeted ones like “remote jobs” or “work from home.” Secondly, in order to determine where people are looking for remote employment the most, they compared the monthly searches to the population size.
The conclusions of their research surely contain a few unexpected findings. According to an average of all relevant search phrases, these are the top 10 countries that are most interested in remote work: Cyprus, Latvia, Ireland, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Slovenia, Chile, Finland, Greece, and Colombia.
In general, Cyprus is well ahead. This is extremely understandable when one considers how many people from different nations already live on the sunny island in the Mediterranean Sea.
The fact that Latvia places second is unexpected. While Latvia is by far the world leader in terms of keywords connected to “work from home,” further study of the data indicates that Latvians are evidently not interested in going around the world with their computers. The fact that Saudi Arabia came in fourth as a surprise also shows that the conservative desert nation is not being left behind by global digital trends.
Germany, France, Spain, and the UK are all wealthy nations in Western Europe that fall inside the middle range. After matching the results with the size of the population in those countries, it appears that remote work is not as prevalent here. It’s possible that these nations’ progressive workplace cultures and social systems make local office jobs enticing.
The ten countries that have the least interest in remote employment are: Turkey, Tunisia, Bolivia, Vietnam, Indonesia, Egypt, South Korea, Pakistan, Algeria, and Bangladesh. For some of those countries, poor economic conditions might become a reason why many people consider other aspects associated with a job more important than the possibility to work remotely.
In order to obtain those results, the Happy Beavers looked at all the pertinent remote work-related terms and compared the data to the population size. It is clear from this study that interest in remote work varies substantially across states. Nonetheless, research like this can give a solid indication of which states remote work is common and popular and where it is still rather an exception.
In the meantime, many countries have already taken notice of the trend and are actively seeking out remote workers, mainly from wealthier nations. These countries’ governments permit citizens to reside and work abroad for a lengthy period of time. This way people may then benefit from lower housing and living expenses or from better weather at their remote workplace.
Besides, while The Happy Beavers clarifies in its research which nations are most interested in remote labor, the trend toward remote employment seems to be spreading. Thus, firms from all around the world should be ready for the rising demand, particularly among younger generations.
