Meaningless (?) statistic of the day

[trixtah]

Around 78% of New Zealanders have passports. 83% of British people have a passport (gosh! all those kids under 16 with passports). I can only get a rough figure for passports in Australia, but the figure cited is a million issued a year. Given 10 years for a passport's validity, that gives us 10 million passports, or around 50% of the population.

Approximately 17% of USAians have passports.

Food for thought, eh?

(of course, the discrepency in numbers between the percentage of passports issued to kiwis and those to Aussies would be explained by Australians as representing the number of us NZers cluttering up their fair land...)

ETA: Some of my numbers are a bit off; check my comment below for updates. The proportions are roughly the same; my point hasn't changed.

Comments

Passports

[(Anonymous)]

According to the Economist, 34% of Americans (USAians? Who is the genius that came up with that?) hold passports. I find it hard to believe that 86% of Brits hold passports even though I am one. There must be AT LEAST 14% of the population that is in old age homes, don't travel, poor, etc.

Re: Passports

[trixtah.livejournal.com]

Not everyone who lives in the Americas is from the US. Since I have friends from Colombia and Mexico, I'm reluctant to call people from the US "Americans". It's like calling the English "Europeans". Of course they are (unless you're a Sun reader), but not all Europeans are English. And "USAians" is politer than calling them "Yanks" (which is my normal term for them).

I have no idea who coined the term. It's not pretty, but hell, it's obvious who I'm talking about.

Yes, I thought the 86% number high when I wrote it down, but that's because my maths was skewif. There are about 14 million people in the UK who don't hold passports (http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200405/cmhansrd/cm050117/text/50117w23.htm), which actually means 75-78% of the population do hold them.

The US figure I got from various sources and averaged them out. I haven't seen where the Economist got their figures from - they didn't cite a source in their article. This (http://www.travelagentcentral.com/travelagentcentral/article/articleDetail.jsp?id=75568) seems to be a fairly representative figure. If you look at the statistics for last year (http://travel.state.gov/passport/services/stats/stats_890.html), the numbers issued grew by another million. This still only brings us up to 21% of the US population, although it now seems my 17% was out-of-date (and low, obviously).

My point remains the same.