Skift Take
The world has less restrictive visa policies in 2016 than it did before the global economic crisis. Let's hope temporary setbacks from terror attacks and security fears don't cause governments to send us backwards.
As violent attacks during the past year in the U.S. and abroad made some governments reexamine their visa policies, the world has far fewer visa restrictions in 2016 than it's ever had.
The percentage of the world's population that needs a visa to travel somewhere has decreased 14% from 1980 to 2015 (see charts below). In 1980 75% of the world's population needed a visa to travel internationally compared to 61% in 2015. That's according to the United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) which recently released its annual Visa Openness Report, with its latest edition covering 2015.
Last year about 18% of the world's population could enter a destination without a visa and another 15% needed visas on arrival. UNWTO's analysis showed that between 2010 and
