The Covid pandemic has seen international travel grind to a halt, so visa concerns have been shunted onto the backburner by more pressing events.  Nonetheless, research from the University of Göttingen highlights the inequities still present that should be addressed in the years ahead.

The research explores the costs associated with securing a travel permit to another country and found that people from poorer countries are often paying many times more than those from European countries.

Travel costs

The researchers gathered data on visa costs when travelling between countries across the world.  The data reveals that people from North Africa and South Asia are paying around three times as much for a tourist visa as people from Western Europe.

This flagrant inequality becomes even starker when one takes into account the differences in wealth between any two countries.  For instance, Europeans will typically have to work for a fraction of a day to afford the visa they require to travel.  Africans, by contrast, will require several weeks or even months worth of work in order to generate the visa fee.

“Our dataset provides information about a dimension of global inequality that has, so far, received little attention,” the researchers conclude. “While Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that every person has the right to move freely and to leave any country, including their own, in reality there are barriers at many different levels which can obstruct global mobility, depending on where you come from. And our data clearly shows that these barriers include visa costs.”