After stepping down as New Zealand's prime minister in 2023, Jacinda Ardern took up a role at Harvard University and is now based in Sydney. Her decision to live abroad has struck a nerve with Kiwis, who were already worried about high levels of emigration.
Anxiety over the former prime minister's living arrangements hints at a wider trend across the West. Politicians focus on how many people migrate to their country, but less noticed is that people are leaving in record numbers.
The rise of the 'expat economy' will have profound consequences. Governments do a poor job of tracking emigrants, and for years Britain had no exit checks, meaning someone could leave and no one would know.
The Economist has produced the first comprehensive measure of gross emigration from Western countries, tracking the comings and goings of people leaving on a permanent or semi-permanent basis. According to our best estimate, roughly 4m people emigrated from those places in 2024, about 20% more than just before the pandemic.
Greek emigration has fallen sharply from its level in the mid-2010s, as that country's economy has gone from being among Europe's laggards to being one of its star performers. But most places saw big increases.
In the third quarter of 2025, the number of departures from Canada was 34% higher than six years before. New Zealand's emigration in 2025 was 29% higher than in 2019. In Sweden, it was more than 60% higher.
A recent update from Italy's official statistics office noted a 'boom in emigration to foreign countries.' Iceland's office recently reported the highest level of emigration on record.
The surge in emigration is, in part, the unwinding of a huge immigration boom in 2022 and 2023. In those years, Western countries admitted extraordinary numbers of newcomers, many of whom never intended to stay permanently.
Higher churn among foreigners is not the whole story, however. An expat economy is genuinely emerging. In Ireland, departures of citizens are up by 29% compared with 2019. In New Zealand, they are up by 74%.
According to recent official data, emigration of British nationals is also edging up. But these estimates are notoriously unreliable, and our analysis of OECD data finds no surge in the number of British-born people living abroad.
Yet data from a recent official study in New Zealand suggests that people with at least an undergraduate degree are at least twice as likely to emigrate in their 20s.
Our estimates suggest that since 2019, the number of Western-born people living in another Western country has grown by about 2m. America has taken more than 40% of that increase, in part because ambitious Europeans have gone there to make their AI fortunes.
Three factors explain the rise of the expat economy. First, the pandemic normalised the idea of geographical arbitrage. Once firms accepted that an employee could work effectively from a kitchen table three hours away, it became easier to imagine one working even farther afield.
Taxes are the second factor. In recent years, many Western governments have implemented 'Robin Hood' tax policies that take an ever larger share of rich people's incomes.
Politics play a role, too. Many of the Americans who waltz around Hampstead dislike Mr Trump. Many of the Britons who have moved to Dubai detest 'Keir Starmer's socialist Britain.'
A range of surveys show declining faith in democracy. A paper published last year by Assaf Razin of Tel Aviv University finds convincing evidence that 'democratic decline tends to increase emigration.'
Sending countries can suffer. When a state invests in educating young people only to lose them, it forfeits future tax revenues. The fiscal hit is especially acute in smaller economies with ageing populations.
Yet for every country losing a clever, open-minded person, another country gains. Over the past decade, the number of Americans living in Germany has risen by over 60%.
Germans have replaced many of the departing Kiwis, with their numbers 50% higher than in the mid-2000s. If those people are able to earn higher salaries than before or enjoy their life more, the world may be better off overall.
