How we ranked the best countries for Americans to move to after the pandemic

• Business Insider recently published a list of the best countries for Americans to move to after the coronavirus pandemic.
• We used five metrics from surveys and data sets that looked at climate and living costs, among other factors.

Business Insider recently took a look at the best countries for Americans to move to after the pandemic.

We used the most recently available data from a variety of data sets and surveys to get figures for five metrics.

After we collected our figures, we rescaled each metric onto a five-point scale where the country or countries with the lowest values were rescaled to zero and the country or countries with the highest values were rescaled to five.

We then added those values together to find the countries that scored the highest, indicating a possible place to move to next.

Following are the sources for each of our five metrics.

• "Democracy Index" 2019: Our list of countries focused on the 76 places listed as full or flawed democracies in The Economist Intelligence Unit's "Democracy Index" 2019 report. According to The Economist, this index is determined by using five categories with 60 total indicators.
• Average annual temperature, 2016: To get a sense of places with generally good weather, we averaged the monthly temperatures in 2016 for each country, the most recent year of data available from the World Bank Group. Once we had this annual figure, we looked at how far the temperature was from 70 degrees Fahrenheit, an ideal number based on previous surveys, such as the one from YouGov in 2014 that asked Americans this question.
• Daily coronavirus cases per capita: To determine which countries would be good to move to after the outbreak subsides in the US, we decided to look at which countries have seemed to already flatten their curves. To do this, we used coronavirus data from John Hopkins University where we averaged the daily new cases of coronavirus per 100,000 people from July 6 to July 19. We decided to look at per capita values because it allows us to compare new cases in countries with varying population sizes.
• Cost of living, current mid-2020 figures: Our cost of living scores are based on the most recent country ranking from the crowd-sourcing site Numbeo, which ranks the cost of living for each city relative to New York City. To get the country's average, Numbeo aggregates the cities in that country weighted by the city's number of contributors.
• Migrant Acceptance Index, 2016 and 2017: Our final metric is Gallup's Migrant Acceptance Index where Gallup surveyed about 1,000 people in 138 countries in 2016. The US and Canada were also surveyed in 2017. Gallup asked three questions regarding a respondent's feelings about immigrants in the country, where each question has a maximum value of three points for a possible total score of nine. Gallup said, "The response 'a good thing' is worth three points, a volunteered response of 'it depends' or 'don't know' is worth one point, and 'a bad thing' is worth zero points."