A map of the world’s most and least racially tolerant countries

The World Values Survey has been measuring global attitudes and opinions for decades, which is why two Swedish economists turned to its information in their examination of whether economic freedom made people any more or less racist. You might not be surprised at this verdict: Racism is is still a rampant problem throughout the world.

Which are the countries that have it worse than others? The Washington Post reported on the survery.

SEE ALSO: Ronaldinho sheds light on racism problem in Mexico 

The survey asked dozens of questions but among those, one stuck out as an efficient and accurate indicator of tolerance for other races. The survey asked respondents in more than 80 different countries to identify kinds of people they would not want as neighbors. Some respondents, picking from a list, chose “people of a different race.” The more frequently that people in a given country say they don’t want neighbors from other races, the economists reasoned, the less racially tolerant you could call that society.

The survey found that Anglo and Latin countries are the most tolerant. People in the survey were most likely to embrace a racially diverse neighbor in the United Kingdom and its Anglo former colonies (the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) and in Latin America. The only real exceptions were oil-rich Venezuela, where income inequality sometimes breaks along racial lines, and the Dominican Republic, perhaps because of its adjacency to troubled Haiti. Scandinavian countries also scored high.

The most racially intolerant populations are all in the developing world, with India and Jordan in the top five. The country with the highest proportion of ‘intolerant’ people who wanted neighbors similar to them was Jordan, where 51.4% of the population would refuse to live next to someone of a different race. India followed with 43.5%. Racist views are strikingly rare in the U.S., according to the survey, which claims that only 3.8% of residents are reluctant to have a neighbor of another race.

Other English-speaking countries once part of the British Empire shared the same tolerant attitude – fewer than five per cent of Britons, Canadians, Australians and New Zealanders showed signs of racism.

SEE ALSO: Racism is bad in Brazil if you’re Black, unless you’re visiting

The Middle East, which is currently dealing with large numbers of low-skilled immigrants from south Asia, seems to be a hotbed of racial tension, however. Europe is remarkably split – the west of the continent is generally more tolerant than the east, but France is a striking outlier with 22.7 per cent of the French rejecting neighborhood diversity.

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