2026 Global Residency Programs Report: Full Report

The 2026 Global Residency Programs Index is a research benchmark produced by Global Citizen Solutions and its Global Intelligence Unit. It scores and ranks 48 of the world’s leading residency programs across 46 jurisdictions on a single, comparable basis, spanning passive golden visas, tax-led residence routes and active-investor and entrepreneur visas. Its purpose is to present a structured, evidence-based comparison of what a program actually delivers. 

The Index rests on five weighted pillars. Quality of Life (30%) and Procedure (30%) carry the most weight, because they most directly shape an applicant’s lived experience and the reliability of the outcome. Mobility (20%) prices in the onward travel value of the status and of any citizenship it may lead to. Investment (10%) captures cost and tax efficiency. Compliance & Credibility (10%) measures the governance and durability that the past decade has shown to be decisive. Every program is scored on the same pillars, with the same weights, so that differences in the results reflect differences in the programs rather than shifting assumptions. 

The methodology set out in the preceding chapter documents exactly how that is done, how each pillar is constructed from its components, how the underlying indicators are normalized and rescaled, how the composite score is calculated, and how the field is ranked.  

The chapters that follow interpret the results against the wider evidence base, the reports of the European Commission, the OECD and the IMF, the rulings of the Court of Justice of the European Union, primary legislation and peer-reviewed scholarship. Together they tell a single, coherent story about a market that has changed more in ten years than in the previous forty. The opening chapter traces a decade of reform and consolidation, following the industry from the property-linked boom through the changes that reshaped the field and redefined the relationship between residence and citizenship inside the EU. The chapter that follows reads the 2026 data and the growing weight of active, entrepreneur-led routes, before a third turns to tax, the arena where competition has now moved: from the visa to the residence regime attached to it. 

The final two chapters turn to the direction of travel. One documents the structural shift from passive property toward active, development-aligned capital, taking Portugal and New Zealand as the defining cases; the other looks to the decade ahead, a rising tide of wealth, evolving rules, and residence increasingly acquired as the first step on a longer path to citizenship. Read in sequence, the chapters move from history to outlook, building a picture of an industry that has matured into a more transparent and more substantive proposition, and pointing consistently toward the same conclusion: that the most valuable program is the one most likely to still be worth having in ten years’ time. 

The boom years and the property template 

A decade ago, the sector was defined by expansion and by a single dominant product: the property-linked golden visa. In the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis and the 2010–2012 Eurozone sovereign-debt crisis, capital-starved economies on Europe’s periphery turned to foreign investors to absorb unsold real estate, recapitalize banks and rebuild reserves under austerity. Portugal (2012), Spain (2013) and Greece (2013) among others launched schemes that offered little more real estate purchasing as investment option. Demand was strong, intermediaries multiplied, and a genuine industry. Lawyers, migration agents, developers, due-diligence firms and licensed concessionaires took shape around the business of investment migration. 

The closures, country by country 

What followed was a wave of closures, driven far less by any failure of the programs themselves than by shifting domestic politics, EU-accession optics and an abundance of official caution. Cyprus suspended and then ended its citizenship scheme in November 2020. Bulgaria abolished its citizenship route in March 2022, and Montenegro wound down its program in December 2022, both under EU-accession and security pressure. Ireland closed its Immigrant Investor Programme in February 2023, and the United Kingdom had already shut its Tier 1 Investor visa in February 2022. Each closure followed the same orderly template: the program shut to new applicants while every investor already admitted kept their rights in full, the mark of governments managing political risk, not unwinding a discredited product. 

The property-linked golden visa was then adjusted on housing grounds. Greece raised its property threshold to €800,000 in prime areas from 1 September 2024; Spain wound down its golden visa on 3 April 2025 under Organic Law 1/2025, having issued roughly 22,430 such visas over the program’s twelve-year life.  

In the same month, the legal question at the heart of the decade received an answer, though a deeply contested one. In Commission v Malta (Case C-181/23), the Grand Chamber of the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled on 29 April 2025 that a Member State granting nationality for predetermined payments, without a genuine connection to the country, breaches Article 20 TFEU and the duty of sincere cooperation in Article 4(3) TEU — an unlawful “commercialization” of Union citizenship. Malta’s residency route survived; its citizenship route did not (Commission v Malta, 2025). 

The Court reached its conclusion in direct opposition to its own Advocate General. Only months earlier, in October 2024, Advocate General Collins had advised the Court to dismiss the Commission’s action, finding that it had failed to prove that Article 20 TFEU imposes any ‘genuine link’ requirement, and warning that reading one into the Treaties would work a ‘wholly unlawful erosion’ of the Member States’ exclusive competence over nationality, a field they have deliberately chosen to keep under their own control (Opinion of AG Collins, 2024). That competence is no technicality: nationality law is among the last redoubts of national sovereignty, and the Advocate General’s reasoning tracked the Court’s own prior case law, under which Member States are bound to recognize one another’s nationality decisions.  

The final judgment, however, avoids this discussion altogether, resting instead on good faith and sincere cooperation; several EU-law commentators read this as the Court reaching a politically desired outcome in search of a rationale, with Kochenov among those cautioning that it stretches EU competence into sovereign territory and nudges the Union toward illiberalism (Kochenov, 2025). 

The housing-politics phase  

From 2023 the dominant driver of reform in Western Europe was housing affordability. Golden visas became a political lightning rod, blamed for pricing locals out of the market, yet the evidence suggests that blame was, at most, only partly deserved, and the harder data suggests barely at all. In Portugal, house prices rose roughly 55% over a decade while incomes grew only about 9%, and prices kept climbing (16.9% year-on-year to April 2025) even after real estate was removed from the golden visa (Global Citizen Solutions, 2025), a pattern pointing to chronic under-supply and lagging wages rather than investor visas.  

The scale of the program bears this out: golden-visa property purchases accounted for only about 0.6% of Portuguese real-estate transactions in 2022, and roughly 1.6% by value, while the residential markets under most pressure (Lisbon and Porto) had already been closed to golden-visa property acquisition since January 2022 (Global Citizen Solutions, 2025).  

Spain tells the same story: of the roughly 4.5 million homes sold between 2013 and 2023, golden-visa real-estate purchases made up around 0.1%, and in 2023 fewer than one in ten foreign purchases even reached the €500,000 threshold the visa required, some 4,200 homes bought by non-EU investors, against a market of that size (Global Citizen Solutions, 2025). 

The true drivers lie elsewhere. Portugal’s housing deficit (estimated at around 170,000 units, and projected to reach 200,000 to 300,000 by 2030) traces back to the collapse in homebuilding after the 2008 crisis, when construction fell to levels not seen since before 1919, compounded by planning delays, rising build costs and the conversion of long-term homes into short-term tourist rentals [20]. Spain’s own central bank attributes its post-2021 price surge to economic recovery, pandemic savings, low interest rates and tourism rather than foreign investor demand (Global Citizen Solutions, 2025).  

Against shortfalls of that magnitude, a few thousand investor purchases were never going to move the market. The political economy nonetheless made curtailment irresistible, and it reframed the entire product away from residential property, arguably discarding, in the process, a channel of foreign capital that might instead have been redirected toward the affordable, energy-efficient housing these markets actually need. 

New centers of gravity 

As Europe consolidated, the market’s center of gravity migrated. The Middle East built an entirely new long-term residency market almost from scratch: Qatar (2018), the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia (both 2019), Oman (2021) and Bahrain (2022) launched frameworks designed to attract talent and capital as the Gulf states diversified away from oil in the wake of the 2014–2016 price collapse and under national strategies such as Saudi Vision 2030 (Global Citizen Solutions, 2024). The pandemic then accelerated demand everywhere, as border closures and the normalization of remote work made a credible second residence a priority for the wealthy. 

Asia-Pacific modernized in parallel. Singapore tightened its Global Investor Programme, Hong Kong relaunched its capital scheme in 2024, Thailand introduced a long-term resident visa in 2022, Indonesia launched a golden visa in 2024, and New Zealand rebuilt its active-investor route in 2025. Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine sharpened the whole picture, turning scrutiny onto any scheme that might serve as a backdoor for sanctioned wealth and accelerating both the tightening of due diligence and the European closures. By the mid-2020s the newest and most dynamic programs were concentrated outside Western Europe, even as the highest-scoring established ones remained within it. 

The new equilibrium 

The market that emerges in 2026 is more mature, more discerning and more resilient than the one that entered the decade, the changes of the past ten years have not diminished the industry so much as strengthened it. Two structural features define this stronger market.  

• First, the qualifying investment has evolved from passive real estate toward funds, business capitalization, job creation and, in some cases, investment in research and cultural projects, a shift that channels capital into productive, development-aligned uses and gives programs a foundation government can defend on their economic merits.  
• Second, due diligence, transparency and compliance now sit at the center of a program’s standing, raising the quality of the whole market and giving applicants and jurisdictions alike something they can trust. 

Each of these developments has made the surviving programs more robust, more credible and better built to last. The GRPI’s decision to weight Compliance & Credibility explicitly, and to reward fast but well-governed processing, tracks this new reality directly: the programs that lead today are those that have turned a decade of pressure into genuine strength. 

It scores and ranks 48 of the world’s leading residency programs across 46 jurisdictions on a single, comparable basis, spanning passive golden visas, tax-led residence routes and active-investor and entrepreneur visas.Its purpose is to present a structured, evidence-based comparison of what a program actually delivers. 

Europe dominates the field with 17 of the 48 programs, more than a third of the index and a larger presence than any other region by a wide margin, spanning the Western European core (Switzerland, Portugal, Italy, Greece, Luxembourg, Malta), the smaller wealth-and-tax jurisdictions (Jersey, Monaco, Cyprus), and the Central and Eastern European and edge markets (Hungary, Estonia, Latvia, Bulgaria, Montenegro, Serbia, Turkey). Asia and the Americas form the next tier at 11 programs each: Asia ranges from the advanced hubs of Singapore, Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea to the emerging Southeast Asian routes of Malaysia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand and Cambodia, while the Americas span three distinct sub-regions — North America (Canada and the two US routes), the Caribbean (Cayman Islands, Bahamas, Dominican Republic) and Latin America (Brazil, Mexico, Costa Rica, Panama, Paraguay). The Middle East contributes a compact but high-value bloc of five Gulf programs (the UAE, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Oman), and Oceania and Africa are represented by two programs each — New Zealand and Australia, and Mauritius and Namibia respectively — small samples whose regional averages describe those specific programs rather than any broader continental trend. 

The top ten 

The 2026 leaders are Switzerland (91.9), the UAE (91.5), Portugal’s ARI golden visa (91.3), Italy (90.3), Greece (89.5), New Zealand’s Active Investor Plus (89.4), Portugal’s D2 entrepreneur route (89.3), Singapore’s Global Investor Programme (89.2), Luxembourg (88.9) and Canada (88.6). The single most telling feature of this list is its balance: six entries are golden visas or tax-led residence routes, and four are active-investor or entrepreneur visas. The market now rewards both models. 

Switzerland tops the table not as a classic golden visa, but as a tax-led residence route, pairing an expenditure-based tax arrangement with flawless compliance and elite quality of life. The UAE sits second on the strength of the strongest investment proposition in the Index, a near-perfect investment score built on zero personal income tax and a low entry threshold. Portugal appears twice: its fund-donation based Golden Visa is the benchmark European programs with a 7–10-year citizenship horizon, depending on the applicant’s nationality, while its D2 route is the standout entrepreneur pathway into the EU. Italy and Greece anchor the European core on the strength of, respectively, a strategic-investment design and the fastest, most established process in the Index. New Zealand, Singapore, Canada and, just below, Japan and Australia demonstrate that active, talent-oriented models can compete at the very top, particularly where quality of life is exceptional. 

The five pillars, read closely 

Quality of Life: 

Australia (97.0) and Canada (96.6) top the pillar by a clear margin, with Switzerland (92.9) anchoring the European core and the Asian democracies: Singapore, Japan, Taiwan and South Korea, clustering just behind. The Index’s most heavily weighted dimension is also its most durable: institutional quality, healthcare, education and safety accrue over generations and cannot be bought by an incoming investor, which is precisely why they carry the most weight.  

The ranking aligns with independent data: in the UNDP’s Human Development Report 2025, Switzerland ranks joint-second globally (HDI 0.970) and Australia sits within the top ten, but it is deliberately broader than HDI alone, blending human development (40%) with healthcare (30%), safety (20%) and migrant acceptance (10%). That last component is what lifts Canada to second, above its raw HDI standing: the pillar rewards not just how developed a country is, but how well it welcomes the families these programs serve.  

Read regionally, Oceania posts the highest average of any region on the strength of just two premium entries. The Gulf’s world-class infrastructure pushes the Middle East narrowly ahead of Europe on average, though the societies that lead the pillar are those that pair wealth with strong institutions and genuine openness to newcomers. 

Procedure: 

Greece leads the pillar (97.5), and the reason is instructive: its golden visa runs on one of the fastest, most well-worn administrative machines in the GRPI (decisions in roughly four to six months) paired with no minimum-stay obligation, so an applicant can secure and hold the status without uprooting their life.  

The next tier is dominated not by the wealthiest or most prestigious jurisdictions but by a cluster of Latin American programmes that turn speed and administrative simplicity into a genuine competitive edge: Brazil (93.6), Costa Rica (92.4), the Dominican Republic (91.2) and Mexico (91.0) all rank among the very top performers on process. The Dominican Republic clears applications in as little as 45 to 90 days with minimal presence requirements; Costa Rica and Mexico ask only for a light annual or eventual connection; Brazil combines an eight-month timeline with a fast onward path to naturalisation. These are not high-threshold, heavily lawyered routes, they are lean, predictable and quick, and that is precisely what earns them their scores.  

Italy (92.8) and Cyprus (91.7) show that the established European centres can compete on the same terms, each processing in one to three months, but they do so alongside, rather than ahead of, the Latin American field. 

The deeper point is that Procedure rewards deliverability, not affluence. The pillar blends processing time with the things that make a programme easy to live with: light physical-presence rules, family inclusion, a clear route to permanent residence and citizenship, and favourable treatment of foreign income. And on those measures a mid-cost Latin American residence can outperform European or Gulf programs.  

For an applicant whose priority is a fast, low-friction, reliable process rather than the strongest possible passport, the Procedure pillar redraws the map entirely, pushing accessible, lower-cost programmes to the front and demonstrating that bureaucratic efficiency is a resource some states have cultivated far more successfully than others. 

Mobility: 

Seven programmes achieve a flawless Mobility score of 100 in 2026: Switzerland, Portugal’s Golden Visa, Italy, Portugal’s D2 entrepreneur route, Singapore, Malta and Hungary. Just behind them, a tight cluster scores between 98 and 99.4, the UAE, Greece, Australia, Bulgaria, New Zealand, Luxembourg, Japan, Estonia and Malaysia among them. What unites the leaders is not a shared strategy but a shared asset: each sits behind a passport or residence that already commands near-universal access. The programme is simply the door into an existing mobility position. 

At the other extreme, the lowest scorers, Vietnam, Namibia and Cambodia, the Philippines , the Dominican Republic and Indonesia, reflect passports with far narrower reach. No amount of investment changes the underlying travel document in the short term; the residence buys presence, not a stronger passport. 

Grouped by region, the pattern is stark and consistent. 

• Oceania leads with an average Mobility score of about 99, off just two programmes (Australia and New Zealand), both backed by strong, well-connected passports. 
• Europe follows closely at roughly 96 across its 17 programmes — the deepest and most uniformly high-scoring field in the index. Schengen membership is the engine here: a European residence typically unlocks free movement across the entire zone, which lifts the whole cohort. 
• The Americas sit in the middle near 90, pulled up by Canada, the United States and Brazil and down by smaller Central American passports. 
• Asia averages around 77, but with enormous internal spread, Singapore and Japan score in the high 90s while Vietnam and the Philippines anchor the bottom of the entire index. 
• The Middle East averages about 76, again with wide variation between the Gulf’s stronger and weaker travel documents. 
• Africa, represented by two programmes, trails at roughly 67. 

The regional story is really a passport story. Europe and Oceania dominate not because their programmes are cleverer but because the documents underneath them already travel well, and because European free movement multiplies the value of a single residence across a continent. Regions whose passports open fewer borders start the race behind, and a residency programme, however well designed, cannot close that gap on its own. 

However, when mobility is tested against how long each programme takes to reach citizenship (measured for the 37 programmes that actually offer a naturalisation route) the relationship changes. 

Two examples make the disconnect concrete. Malta posts a perfect Mobility score of 100, yet its programme leads only to permanent residence, not a citizenship track. The UAE scores 99.4 on Mobility, but naturalisation for most foreign nationals is measured in decades rather than years and remains highly restricted in practice. In both cases the travel document is superb; the path to owning it is effectively closed. The same caution applies to Malaysia and the United States’ E-2 route, high or solid mobility, no direct road to citizenship. 

For someone whose real goal is a second nationality, the useful move is to read Mobility and time-to-citizenship together rather than letting a headline score stand in for both. 

A small group of programmes scores highly on Mobility and offers a citizenship route within about five years, the genuine sweet spot for applicants who want both reach and a realistic timeline. Canada (98.8, about three years), Australia (99.4, four years), Brazil (95.3, four years), and a cluster at five years including New Zealand, Luxembourg, Japan, Bulgaria, South Korea and the United States’ EB-5 route all combine near-top mobility with a timeline measured in a handful of years. 

Europe rewards patience differently. Its programs lead the index on Mobility, but its average path to citizenship is longer, around seven to eight years for most residence-based routes, and ten in several cases. Portugal, long the region’s notable exception on speed at just five years for naturalization was revisited in 2026. Under Organic Law No. 1/2026, published on 18 May and in force from 19 May 2026, the naturalization residency requirement rose from five years to seven years for EU and nationals from Portuguese-speaking countries (CPLP) and ten years for all other nationalities, and the clock now starts only from the date the first residence permit is issued rather than the date of application. Applications filed on or before 18 May 2026 remain protected under the previous five-year regime, but for anyone entering Portugal after that date the reform closed one of the fastest mainstream routes to an EU passport, a change that matters far more to a second-nationality plan than Portugal’s perfect Mobility score. 

Among the GCC countries, Mobility scores are high in some nations, such as the UAE, that scores 99.4 (near the global top, on the strength of a passport reaching 183 destinations), and Saudi Arabia with a respectable 87.6. 

The citizenship story is the most important one for anyone thinking beyond residence. Four of the five offer no realistic path to a passport at all — Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Oman are all logged as “naturalisation highly restricted,” and the same four do not permit dual citizenship. The UAE is the only one with any route, and it’s 30 years for non-Arab nationals (with preferential 7-year and 3-year tracks for Arab and fellow-GCC nationals), which for the typical international applicant is effectively closed. This is the cleanest illustration in the entire dataset of the point the article makes: the UAE pairs a top-tier travel document and flawless tax score with a citizenship horizon that, for most people, doesn’t exist. 

The practical read: the Gulf programmes are built for a specific profile — someone who wants tax efficiency, a low-friction application, minimal stay obligations and strong mobility (in the UAE’s case), and who is content with long-term residence rather than a second nationality.  

Investment: 

The Gulf sweeps the pillar: Qatar (99.7), Saudi Arabia (99.7), Bahrain (99.6), the UAE (99.3) and Oman (97.3). giving the Middle East a regional average of 99.1, far clear of every other region.  

The driver is fiscal, and the pillar’s design makes it decisive: 80% of the score turns on the tax regime (tax system and tax rates, 40% each) and only 20% on the entry threshold, so over a multi-year hold the effective cost of the residence dwarfs its one-off price. The UAE levies no personal income tax at all, and its neighbors offer comparably light regimes. But this is a story about tax, not geography: the zero-tax havens of the Atlantic and Caribbean, the Bahamas (99.1) and the Cayman Islands (98.5), sit right alongside the Gulf, while Europe’s best (Switzerland and Portugal) trail precisely because their tax regimes, however competitive, are not zero.  

However, in some jurisdictions, the era of the wholly tax-free jurisdiction is closing, the UAE introduced a 9% corporate tax from June 2023, on taxable income exceeding AED 375,000, with income below this threshold taxed at 0% (UAE Ministry of Finance, n.d.), even as regional wealth momentum reinforces the Gulf’s pull: UBS found personal wealth grew fastest in Europe, the Middle East and Africa in 2025, at 17.5% (UBS, 2026).  

Compliance & Credibility: 

This is the pillar where the best programs bunch at the ceiling: Switzerland, Portugal’s Golden Visa, the UAE, Italy, Canada, Australia and both US routes (E-2 and EB-5) all post a perfect 100, with New Zealand (99.9) and Singapore (98.8) a fraction behind. The clustering is by design, the pillar takes the higher of an internally constructed four-dimension governance score: FATF status, track record, industry recognition and perceived-corruption performance. 

What the score really proxies is durability: after a decade in which entire programs were closed by governance failures rather than by price, this pillar is a bet on the probability that a program will still exist, and still be respected, when an applicant finally comes to rely on it.  

Regionally, Oceania tops out at a perfect 100 on the strength of its two entries, with Europe (88.6) and the Americas (87.9) close behind and the Gulf (86.2) still maturing on track record even as the UAE reaches the summit.  

Regional insights 

Across the field the golden visas model still dominates (34 golden visas or tax-led residency routes to 14 active-investor or entrepreneur ones) but the chart below shows that balance is highly regional rather than uniform.

Europe, despite being the largest bloc, is the one that offers the largest number of golden visas: fifteen of its seventeen programmes are golden visas or tax-led routes such as Portugal’s Golden Visa, Greece’s real-estate scheme and Switzerland’s lump-sum tax residence, with only Portugal’s D2 entrepreneur visa and Estonia’s business-focused route representing the active side.

The Middle East and Africa offer golden visas with different investment options and minimum investment thresholds: the five Gulf programmes (the UAE, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Oman) and the two African entries (Mauritius, Namibia) offer no entrepreneurial route at all. The active model instead clusters in the Pacific and, increasingly, Asia and the Americas: Oceania is the mirror image of Europe, with New Zealand’s Active Investor Plus and Australia’s National Innovation Visa making it the only wholly active region, while Asia (6 passive to 5 active) and the Americas (6 to 5) are close to evenly split, carried by routes like Singapore’s Global Investor Programme, Japan’s Business Manager Visa, Brazil’s VIPER investor visa and the United States’ E-2 Treaty Investor visa.

The pattern underlines the report’s thesis: the shift from passive property toward productive, enterprise-linked capital is real but geographically concentrated, advancing fastest in the newer, growth-oriented markets of Asia-Pacific and the Americas while Europe’s mature golden-visa ecosystem still leans heavily on passive investment.

Europe — the deepest and most consistent field (17 programs) 

Europe supplies more than a third of the residency programs in the GRPI and 11 of the top 20, led by Switzerland (1st, 91.92), Portugal’s Golden Visa (3rd, 91.28), Italy (4th), Greece (5th) and Portugal’s D2 route (7th). It is the only region that scores well across the board rather than spiking on one pillar. 

Its engine is Procedure and Mobility. Europe’s Procedure average of 87.08 is the highest of any region (Greece posts the best Procedure score in the whole index (97.5)) and Schengen membership lifts Mobility to a regional average of 95.64, second only to Oceania, with seven European programmes hitting a perfect 100. Switzerland effectively sweeps the region, leading it on Mobility (100), Tax (89.6), Quality of Life (92.9) and Investment (91.3) simultaneously. 

The clear soft spot is Tax, averaging 79.85, below the global mean and the widest internal spread of any pillar here.  

Middle East (5; average 83.6). The decade’s biggest structural gain. Built almost from scratch since 2018, the Gulf programs owned the investment pillar and pushed the UAE to second overall. Procedure and track record are still maturing, but momentum and capital are firmly here. 

Asia (11; average 82.0). Broad and fast-moving. Singapore and Japan lead on quality of life and passport strength; Hong Kong’s 2024 relaunch, Thailand’s long-term resident visa and Indonesia’s new golden visa show a region actively expanding across both passive and active models. 

Americas — the most internally split region (11 programs) 

The Americas span North America, the Caribbean and Latin America, and the numbers show three different models rather than one. Canada leads (10th, 88.60), followed by the Cayman Islands (16th, 86.37) and Costa Rica (23rd, 84.83). Regional Mobility is respectable at 89.51 (third-best), but Quality of Life (79.71) and Tax (78.98) both sit below the global average. 

The Tax pillar is the giveaway that this is really three regions in one. It’s bimodal: the Caribbean tax havens score a perfect 100 (Cayman Islands, Bahamas) and Central America is close behind (Costa Rica and Panama at 91.7, Paraguay 86.2), while North America records the lowest tax scores in the entire index, both US programs at 58.3 and Canada 68.8. 

Pillar leadership is correspondingly scattered: Canada takes Mobility (98.8) and Quality of Life (96.6, the second-best in the index), the Cayman Islands take Tax (100), the Bahamas take Investment (99.0), and Brazil takes Procedure (93.6). The laggards are pulled down by specific pillars, the Dominican Republic sits at 38th almost entirely because of a Mobility score of 57.6, and the two US routes combine strong mobility (96.5) with the weakest tax and investment scores in the field.  

The regional read: North America offers mobility and lifestyle at a steep tax cost; the Caribbean offers tax and investment efficiency with a weaker passport; Latin America offers cheap, fast entry behind more limited travel documents. 

Middle East — the tax-and-investment bloc (5 programs) 

All five Middle East programmes are Gulf states, and they move as a bloc, led decisively by the UAE (2nd, 91.49), with Qatar (30th), Saudi Arabia (33rd), Bahrain (37th) and Oman (40th) clustered far below. The regional averages are the most lopsided in the index. 

Two pillars are near-perfect and the best of any region: Tax averages 99.50 (four of the five score a flawless 100, Oman 97.5) and Investment averages 99.13, reflecting the zero-income-tax model and low entry thresholds. Quality of Life is solid too at 84.37, above the global mean. 

The offsetting weaknesses are Mobility and Procedure. Mobility averages just 75.52 with the widest internal range anywhere, the UAE scores 99.4 while Bahrain and Oman fall to 59.4 and 60.6, among the lowest in the index, so “a Gulf residence” says nothing about travel strength; the specific state is everything.  

The UAE leads the region on Procedure (89.4), Mobility (99.4) and Tax (100), while Qatar edges Quality of Life (86.8) and Investment (99.7). As covered earlier, citizenship is essentially closed across the bloc, which is the trade-off underneath these scores: exceptional tax and investment efficiency, no realistic passport. 

Asia — the widest quality gap in the index (11 programs) 

Asia contains both some of the strongest and the weakest programmes in the ranking. Singapore (8th, 89.18) and Japan (11th, 88.16) sit near the top, followed by Hong Kong (19th) and Taiwan (20th), while the bottom of the entire index is almost entirely Asian. 

The bifurcation shows up most starkly in Mobility, where the regional average of 77.38 hides an enormous split: Singapore scores a perfect 100, Malaysia 99.4, Japan 98.8, Hong Kong 96.5 and South Korea 95.9, but Vietnam (50.0), Cambodia (51.8), the Philippines (53.5), Indonesia (58.2) and Thailand (60.0) hold the five lowest Mobility scores in the whole dataset. Singapore effectively defines the regional ceiling, leading Asia on Mobility (100), Tax (91.7), Quality of Life (91.2) and Investment (87.3) at once. 

Asia is also the weakest region on two pillars outright: Tax averages just 75.83 (the lowest of any region, the advanced economies of Japan, Taiwan and South Korea all score 65) and Investment averages 79.47 (also the lowest). Procedure is the one consistent bright spot at 84.07, near the global mean, with the Philippines topping the region there (90.0). The trend is a clean divide between mature financial hubs with elite mobility and emerging Southeast Asian economies whose weak passports keep them at the foot of the index. 

Oceania — highest-scoring region (2 programs) 

With only New Zealand (6th, 89.42) and Australia (13th, 87.87), Oceania tops the table on average, but it’s a two-program sample resting on two elite passports rather than a broad trend. Its defining strengths are the two pillars that decide the index: Mobility averages 99.10 (the highest of any region) and Quality of Life averages 93.95, also the highest anywhere. 

The two split their roles cleanly. Australia owns the region’s Mobility (99.4) and posts the single best Quality of Life score in the entire index (97.0), reflecting a strong passport and high living standards. New Zealand leads on the administrative pillars, Procedure (82.5), Tax (85.4) and Investment (83.6). 

The regional weakness is Procedure, averaging just 77.23, well below the global 84.5 and dragged down by Australia’s 71.9, a function of its National Innovation Visa being new (2024) and slow to process. Tax is only middling (81.25).  

Africa — competitive in three pillars (2 programs) 

Africa is represented by only Mauritius (35th, 81.66) and Namibia (47th, 74.81), and lands last overall, but the reason is narrower than the ranking suggests. On three pillars the region is actually competitive: Procedure averages 85.42 (above the global mean), Investment 87.00 (second only to the Middle East) and Tax 84.38 (above average). 

What sinks it is Mobility, averaging just 67.35, the lowest of any region by a wide margin. Namibia in particular scores only 51.8, near the bottom of the entire index, so a decent, low-cost, low-tax programme is undercut by a weak passport. This is the same mechanism seen in emerging Asia and Latin America: strong administrative value, poor travel reach. 

Between the two, Mauritius is clearly the stronger proposition, leading on Procedure (89.1), Mobility (82.9) and Quality of Life (77.0), while Namibia’s relative strengths are narrowly financial, Tax (91.7) and Investment (92.8). With such a small sample the regional average is really a story about two very different programmes rather than a continental trend, but the shared constraint, mobility, is the clearest takeaway. 

Passive versus active: what the split reveals 

One structural reading cuts across the regional and pillar analysis: the division between passive golden visas and active or entrepreneur visas. Of the 48 programs, 34 are golden visas or tax-led residence routes that reward passive, qualifying capital (real estate, funds, bonds, deposits or contributions) while 14 are active-investor or entrepreneur visas that require the holder to build or run a business, create jobs or actively deploy capital. The two models increasingly diverge in design; in the investor they attract and in the political durability they enjoy. 

Golden and tax-led visas should be understood as one of the most efficient channels ever devised for attracting foreign direct investment, and their light physical-presence rules are a feature, not a loophole. These programmes convert global private wealth into committed, long-dated inflows that recipient economies can put to work in designated sectors such as development projects related to environmental preservation, social and cultural projects among others. The variety of investment options is precisely what makes them effective: real-estate routes such as the UAE’s AED 2 million property visa or Greece’s prime-area threshold underwrite construction, urban regeneration and the hospitality and services jobs that surround them; fund routes such as Portugal’s redesigned Golden Visa channel capital into professionally managed vehicles that back Portuguese companies; bond, deposit and capital-transfer routes in the Baltics and Luxembourg strengthen bank balance sheets and public financing; and the lump-sum tax-residence models of Switzerland and Malta anchor high-net-worth taxpayers who then spend, hire, philanthropise and invest locally for years.

Because the presence requirements are minimal (no minimum stay in Greece, Malta, Hungary, the Bahamas or the UAE, a handful of days a year in Portugal or Latvia) these programmes attract exactly the globally mobile investors who would not relocate full-time, but are happy to commit serious capital, meaning countries capture FDI they would otherwise lose entirely. The result, done well, is real: infrastructure financed, reserves rebuilt after crises, new sectors seeded, and a diversified investor base that reduces reliance on any single source of foreign capital.

Portugal’s post-2023 reform, steering the same demand away from housing and toward funds, research, culture and job creation, shows how the model can be continually re-pointed at a country’s highest-value priorities while keeping the low-friction appeal that made it work in the first place.

Entrepreneur and active-investor visas take the same appetite for international mobility and direct it straight into enterprise, jobs and innovation. Where the golden visa mobilises capital, the entrepreneur visa mobilises people and their ventures and talent. The heavier physical-presence and active-management requirements are what make the economic contribution so tangible. When Portugal’s D2 founder builds an operating company, when a Japanese Business Manager visa-holder capitalises and actually runs a business, when Estonia’s or Taiwan’s routes seed new enterprises, or when Australia’s National Innovation Visa welcomes a founder or venture investor, the country gains not just money but a business owner living locally, paying taxes, hiring staff and often creating the next generation of exportable companies. New Zealand’s Active Investor Plus captures this beautifully: its “Growth” pathway rewards genuinely active, higher-impact investment into domestic businesses with the lightest stay obligations, deliberately pricing effort and economic substance over passive holding. These programmes turn residency into a platform for entrepreneurship, deepen a country’s innovation ecosystem, and build durable ties between the investor and the community they’re helping to grow.

Read together, the two models are not rivals but a spectrum of ways to welcome global talent and capital, and the strongest markets increasingly run both. Golden visas widen the funnel, bringing in large volumes of FDI with minimal friction; entrepreneur visas deepen it, converting mobility into hands-on enterprise and jobs. A country offering both can meet investors wherever they are on that journey — from the passive allocator seeking optionality and a stable base to the founder ready to relocate and build — and in doing so turns residency policy into a genuine engine of investment, growth and national development. If you’d like, I can weave this into a short, upbeat “Economic contribution” section for the report, or pair it with a callout box highlighting one flagship FDI example per region.

The Index suggests the active model is punching above its weight. Although active and entrepreneur visas make up under a third of the field, they occupy four of the top ten places — New Zealand, Portugal’s D2, Singapore and Canada — and cluster strongly on quality of life and compliance. This is not coincidental: active routes are easier for governments to defend politically, because they promise jobs and enterprise rather than higher house prices, and they are consequently less exposed to the housing-driven backlash that has hollowed out the passive property model.  

Residence is not tax residence 

A recurring misconception is that acquiring residence automatically relocates an individual’s tax affairs. It does not. Tax residence is determined by separate domestic tests, typically turning on physical presence (commonly the 183-day rule) and the location of one’s center of vital interests, and it is largely unrelated to the immigration status a program confers.  

The flat-tax competition 

As property routes have closed, one of the most decisive competitive levers has shifted to the tax regime attached to residence and the clearest trend is toward fixed, capped levies aimed at the globally wealthy. Italy is the bellwether. Its special regime for new residents (Article 24-bis, TUIR) introduced in 2017, charges a single annual sum on all foreign-source income regardless of amount, leaving Italian-source income taxed normally. That fixed charge has been raised twice: from €100,000 to €200,000 in 2024 (Decree-Law 113/2024) and to €300,000 from 1 January 2026, with an additional €25,000 per family member and a maximum horizon of fifteen years (Legge n. 199/2025). The direction of travel is instructive: Italy still wants globally mobile capital, but it is deliberately pricing the regime toward genuinely substantial wealth. 

Competition is intense. Greece operates an investor-linked regime under Article 5A charging a flat €100,000 on all foreign income (plus €20,000 per family member) for up to fifteen years (Article 5A, Law 4172/2013). Switzerland’s expenditure-based lump-sum taxation, negotiated with the canton of residence, remains the long-standing benchmark for the ultra-wealthy and helps explain its position at the head of the Index. Malta continues to offer a remittance-based regime for resident non-domiciliaries (Article 4 of the Income Tax Act, Chapter 123 of the Laws of Malta). The competitive field for HNWI tax residence is, in short, both crowded and moving upmarket. 

The great narrowing 

Alongside the flat-tax competition runs a countervailing trend: the closure or narrowing of the broad, generous reliefs that defined the 2010s. Portugal’s celebrated Non-Habitual Resident regime was closed to new applicants, with the transition ending on 31 March 2025, and replaced by IFICI, a far narrower incentive aimed at highly qualified professionals in scientific research, technology and innovation, rather than a general relocation tool for the wealthy. 

The United Kingdom abolished its historic non-domiciled “remittance basis” on 6 April 2025, replacing it with a time-limited four-year regime for new arrivals. The net effect is a bifurcation: fixed-fee flat taxes for the very wealthy on one side, and shorter, more conditional reliefs for skilled professionals on the other, with the broad middle-market incentive disappearing. 

The Gulf’s zero-tax proposition — and its limits 

The Gulf’s advantage is structural rather than negotiated. The UAE levies no personal income tax, so salaries, personal investment returns and personal real-estate income are simply untaxed, the foundation of its top-ranked investment score. But even here the picture is evolving. The UAE introduced a federal corporate tax of 9% on business profits above AED 375,000 for financial years beginning on or after 1 June 2023 (Federal Decree-Law No. 47 of 2022). Personal income remains untaxed, and the headline proposition is intact, but the era of the wholly tax-free jurisdiction is closing as global minimum-tax norms and fiscal diversification take hold. For investors, the Gulf still offers the most efficient after-tax residence in the Index; the strategic question is how durable that advantage will prove over a ten- or fifteen-year horizon. 

Beyond the headline regimes 

Beyond the marquee flat taxes, a wider spectrum of regimes shapes the decision. Malta’s remittance-based system allows resident non-domiciliaries to protect foreign income and capital that is not remitted to the island. Monaco levies no personal income tax on its residents (except for French nationals under a bilateral convention), which underpins its standing as a wealth-preservation base. Greece complements its investor flat tax with a separate incentive granting a 50% exemption on employment and business income for qualifying new residents, aimed at working professionals rather than the merely wealthy. And several Caribbean and Gulf jurisdictions levy no personal income tax at all, so the residence itself carries minimal ongoing fiscal cost. 

What unites these regimes is that the tax outcome, not the visa, is increasingly the product. The most sophisticated cross-border families now sequence the two decisions deliberately: they select a residence that delivers the desired lifestyle and mobility, then structure their tax residence (often in the same jurisdiction, sometimes in another) to optimize the after-tax result, while maintaining the substance needed to withstand challenge under the Common Reporting Standard. The programs that win this business are those that offer a coherent package of residence, lifestyle and a defensible, stable tax regime. 

Strategic implications 

Three implications follow for advisers and applicants. First, the residence regime now matters more than the visa’s headline price; a low entry cost paired with an unfavorable tax outcome is a poor trade. Second, tax residence must be planned deliberately and documented carefully, both to secure the intended benefit and to withstand CRS-driven scrutiny. Third, durability is a first-order concern: regimes are being repriced and rewritten with increasing frequency, so the resilience captured by the Index’s Compliance & Credibility pillar is as relevant to tax planning as it is to immigration security. 

The thesis 

The clearest structural shift of the decade is the redirection of qualifying investment away from passive residential property and toward capital that produces measurable economic substance, funds, businesses, jobs, research and cultural goods. This is partly a response to the housing-affordability backlash, but it is also a deliberate policy design choice, endorsed by the European Commission and the OECD and analyzed by the IMF, intended to make these programs defensible on their economic merits rather than merely tolerated for their fiscal contribution. 

Portugal: the defining case 

Portugal is the paradigmatic example. Under Law 56/2023 (the “Mais Habitação” package), in force from October 2023, the government removed real estate and capital-transfer routes from the golden visa while retaining and elevating productive alternatives: qualifying investment funds (from €500,000, with a minimum five-year maturity and at least 60% allocated to companies headquartered in Portugal), scientific research (from €500,000), support for arts and cultural heritage (from €250,000), business capitalization, and the direct creation of jobs. 

New Zealand: active investment by design 

New Zealand illustrates the same logic through an explicitly active-investor design. Its Active Investor Plus visa, revised on 1 April 2025 under the government’s “Going for Growth” agenda, was rebuilt around two categories: a Growth category (NZ$5 million over three years) focused on higher-risk direct investments and managed funds pre-approved by the new Invest New Zealand agency, and a Balanced category (NZ$10 million over five years) that also permits bonds and property development. The minimum was cut from NZ$15 million, the English-language requirement removed, and residence obligations reduced for the more active investors. The design intent is unambiguous: the cheaper route demands genuinely active investment, and the government reinforced this in late 2025 by removing discretionary managed services from the Growth category to ensure the capital is actively deployed for economic benefit. 

The market responded quickly. Between 1 April and 25 September 2025, the program received 348 applications covering 1,122 people, representing a potential minimum investment of around NZ$2.1 billion (Immigration New Zealand, 2025), evidence that a high-priced, actively structured, well-governed route can attract serious capital when the destination’s quality of life is compelling. That momentum has since accelerated: by early 2026 the New Zealand’s Active Investor Plus visa had drawn more than 600 applications and a potential investment pipeline exceeding NZ$3.5 billion, against just 116 applications and roughly NZ$70 million over the two and a half years under the previous settings (Immigration New Zealand, 2026). 

Australia and the wider policy turn 

The pivot is not confined to two countries. Australia replaced its long-running business-investment stream with a talent-and-innovation model (the National Innovation visa) from late 2024, prioritizing exceptional individuals and high-value activity over passive capital. The European Commission and the OECD have consistently pushed in the same direction, toward productive investment, genuine links and robust oversight, and the Index’s own data capture the result: of the 48 programs, 14 now sit in the active-investor or entrepreneur category, and these routes are disproportionately represented at the top of the table. 

Development alignment — and its limits 

The strongest independent evidence on whether these programs actually deliver development comes from the IMF. Its 2025 working paper on the drivers and effects of residence and citizenship by investment finds that the schemes produce a significant positive revenue impact mainly for small island developing states, that broader macroeconomic benefits are inconsistent, and that property prices rise consistently in jurisdictions that operate them — while weak due diligence creates real risks of tax evasion and financial crime (Clerides et al., 2025). Earlier IMF work warned that large, persistent inflows can generate Dutch-disease effects and that program revenues are exposed to “sudden-stop” risk if destination-country policies change (Xu et al., 2015). 

Regarding citizenship programs specifically, the Caribbean CBI nations’ response shows the policy learning in action. In March 2024 the Eastern Caribbean states signed a Memorandum of Agreement setting a regional minimum price floor of US$200,000 from 1 July 2024, ending a damaging price war; committing to enhanced due diligence (including mandatory interviews and independent third-party checks) aligned with the US Treasury’s principles; and establishing a regional regulator to enforce uniform standards (OECS, 2024). 

The lesson for the Index’s higher-income jurisdictions is the same one Portugal and New Zealand have drawn: the durable programs will be those that tie investment to genuine economic contribution, govern it transparently, and do not let public finances become hostage to a volatile inflow. 

Toward development and sustainability goals 

The logical endpoint of the shift to productive capital is explicit alignment with national development and sustainability objectives. Portugal’s retained routes, scientific research, cultural heritage, business capitalization and job creation, already read like a development wish-list, and other jurisdictions are exploring channels into climate resilience, infrastructure and priority sectors. The IMF’s advice to Caribbean governments points the same way: do not over rely on revenue from a unique source and direct FDI from CBI schemes toward resilient, transformative investment. Done well, this reframes the proposition entirely to inviting co-investment in a country’s future.  

Demand: a rising tide of wealth 

The structural driver of demand is the growth of the wealthy population itself. According to the UBS Global Wealth Report, global personal wealth rose 10.8% in 2025, the fastest pace since 2017, and the world added close to one million new US-dollar millionaires in a single year, more than 2,600 a day, bringing the total to roughly 58 million people who together hold nearly half of global wealth (UBS, 2026). UBS projects the millionaire population will keep expanding over the coming years (UBS, 2026). Even if only a small fraction of these individuals ever seek an alternative residence, the addressable market grows every year, and it is growing fastest in exactly the regions (the Middle East, parts of Asia and Eastern Europe) where demand for mobility and optionality is most acute. 

Who the investors are, and what they want 

Academic research provides an unusually clear picture of investor motivation. Kristin Surak’s study of the sector finds that investors are typically motivated by visa-free mobility, by insurance against instability at home, by tax and family planning, and by the use of a residence as a stepping-stone toward residence or citizenship elsewhere, and that almost none intend to relocate permanently to the country whose status they acquire (Surak, 2023). This matters for how the Index is used: for most applicants, quality of life and mobility are aspirational options to be held rather than consumed immediately, while procedure, cost and, increasingly, durability determine the actual decision. The market is best understood not as migration in the traditional sense but as the acquisition of optionality: the right to move, to bank, to educate children and to retire elsewhere, exercised only if and when needed. 

Investor segments: who is actually investing  

The demand pool is not monolithic. Several distinct segments now use these programs for different ends. The globally mobile principal seeks onward travel and a blue-chip base, and prizes mobility and standing. The entrepreneur and active investor wants to build or scale a business and values fast, flexible active routes. The family relocator is driven by education, safety and quality of life, and by an eventual path to citizenship. The tax- and wealth-structuring client prioritizes the residence regime and its durability. And the insurance-driven investor (often from a volatile or authoritarian jurisdiction) treats a second residence as optionality against future risk, rarely intending to move (Surak, 2023). 

These segments value the GRPI pillars differently, which is why a single overall ranking, though useful as a headline, is best read alongside the sub-indices. A family relocator should weight quality of life and the citizenship horizon; an entrepreneur should weight procedure and the design of the active route; a wealth-structuring client should weight the tax regime and compliance. The most powerful application of the Index is therefore diagnostic: to match a profile to the pillars that matter for it, and then to the programs that lead on those pillars. 

Residence first, citizenship later — but slower 

The strategic logic that will define the next decade is sequential: investors increasingly invest in residence as the first step of a longer journey, improving quality of life, diversifying investments and expanding mobility now, with naturalization as the eventual path. But that journey is lengthening. The EU’s insistence on a genuine link, and national moves such as Portugal’s 2025 proposal to extend the residency period required for citizenship from five years to as much as ten, mean the “residence-first, citizenship-later” strategy will demand more patience, more physical presence and more integration than it did in the 2010s. The programs that thrive will be those that pair a credible residence today with a defensible, genuine route to citizenship tomorrow, precisely the combination that the GRPI’s quality-of-life, mobility and compliance pillars are built to identify. 

A regional outlook 

Regionally, the next decade points to continued divergence. The Gulf will consolidate its position as the highest-value, lowest-tax destination. Asia-Pacific will remain the most dynamic arena for new launches and redesigns, competing on quality of life, education and passport strength. The Americas will bifurcate between the premium United States and Canadian active routes and an accessible, lower cost but mobility strong Latin American tier. 

Europe’s IM landscape is maturing. Its enduring advantages are the rule of law, quality of life, Schengen mobility and (for those willing to build a genuine life there) a credible, if lengthening, path to EU citizenship. The European programs that thrive will be those that lean into these strengths, channel investment into funds and enterprise, and accept that they are offering a slower, more substantive proposition to a more discerning applicant.  

Africa, from a low base, has the most room to grow, provided new entrants can establish the governance credibility that the market now demands. 

The investment migration industry has come of age. Over the past decade the sector has been tested from every direction, by European institutions and the OECD, by civil society, by domestic housing politics, and it has emerged not diminished but stronger: more transparent, better governed, and more genuinely useful to the people it serves. What was once a fragmented market of headline-grabbing offers has professionalised into a mature field of 48 credible programmes, each measurable on a like-for-like basis across quality of life, mobility, procedure, investment and tax. The scrutiny of recent years did not shrink the opportunity; it refined it, clearing out the weakest propositions and rewarding jurisdictions that pair real economic contribution with durable governance.

The GRPR shows just how much value that refined market now offers. Mobility remains the great differentiator, and the leaders deliver it in abundance, opening near-universal, visa-free access behind residences that are faster and more flexible than ever. Around that, the market has diversified into genuine specialisation: Europe and Oceania combine elite passports with high living standards and dependable process; the Gulf offers unmatched tax efficiency, low-friction entry and rapid approvals; the Caribbean and Latin America provide accessible, cost-effective routes; and a rising cohort of active and entrepreneur programmes — New Zealand, Portugal’s D2, Singapore and Japan among them — channels productive, job-creating capital while sitting comfortably among the top performers. For the first time, an applicant can match a precise objective (mobility, tax, lifestyle, enterprise or an eventual second passport) to a programme built to deliver exactly that, with the evidence to back the choice.

For investors, the message is optimistic and actionable: this is an industry of good options, and the winning strategy is to plan for the long term and prize credibility. Choose programmes that combine genuine quality of life, real mobility and, where a second nationality is the goal, a defensible path to citizenship, and treat resilience as a feature to seek out rather than a risk to fear, because the strongest programmes now offer it in depth. For the jurisdictions that run these programmes, the decade’s lesson is a constructive one: legitimacy, earned through transparency, due diligence and demonstrable economic value, is not a constraint on the industry but its most powerful engine of growth, and those that embrace it are rewarded with the trust that sustains demand.

That is precisely what the 2026 GRP Index is built to measure, which is why it points consistently toward a confident conclusion: in a maturing, increasingly sophisticated market, the best programmes are not only worth having today, they are the ones most likely to still be worth having in ten years’ time.

References 

Clerides, S., Delgado Coelho, M., Klemm, A. D., & Kotsogiannis, C. (2025). Drivers and effects of residence and citizenship by investment (IMF Working Paper No. WP/25/008). International Monetary Fund. https://www.elibrary.imf.org/view/journals/001/2025/008/001.2025.issue-008-en.xml?cid=560562-com-dsp-crossref  

European Commission. (2019). Report on investor citizenship and residence schemes in the European Union(COM(2019) 12 final). https://commission.europa.eu/system/files/2019-01/com_2019_12_final_report.pdf  

Financial Action Task Force. (2026). Jurisdictions under increased monitoring (June 2026 plenary). FATF. https://www.fatf-gafi.org/en/publications/High-risk-and-other-monitored-jurisdictions/increased-monitoring-june-2026.html  

Global Citizen Solutions. (2025a, November 12). How are Dubai and Abu Dhabi attracting foreign direct investment?https://www.globalcitizensolutions.com/briefing/how-are-dubai-and-abu-dhabi-attracting-foreign-direct-investment/ 

Global Citizen Solutions. (2025b, August 20). Why the golden visa presents an opportunity to solve the housing crisis in Spain and Portugal. https://www.globalcitizensolutions.com/briefing/why-the-golden-visa-presents-an-opportunity-to-solve-the-housing-crisis-in-spain-and-portugal/ 

Global Citizen Solutions. (2026). Global Passport Index 2026. https://www.globalcitizensolutions.com/global-passport-index/ 

Immigration New Zealand. (2025). Active Investor Plus visa overview: Investor category statistics. New Zealand Government. https://www.immigration.govt.nz/about-us/news-centre/investor-category 

Kochenov, D. (2025, April 30). Never mind the law, again: Commission v. Malta (C-181/23). EU Law Live. https://eulawlive.com/op-ed-never-mind-the-law-again-commission-v-malta-c-181-23/ 

Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States. (2024). Memorandum of Agreement on Citizenship by Investment Programmes. OECS. https://pressroom.oecs.int/ 

Surak, K. (2023). The golden passport: Global mobility for millionaires. Harvard University Press. 

Swiss Federal Department of Finance. (n.d.). Lump-sum taxation. Retrieved July 29, 2026, from https://www.efd.admin.ch/en/lump-sum-taxation 

UBS AG. (2026). Global wealth report 2026. UBS. https://www.ubs.com/global/en/media/display-page-ndp/en-20260630-gwr-2026.html 

United Nations Development Programme. (2025). Human Development Report 2025. UNDP. https://hdr.undp.org/ 

Xu, X., El-Ashram, A., & Gold, J. (2015). Too much of a good thing? Prudent management of inflows under economic citizenship programs (IMF Working Paper No. WP/15/93). International Monetary Fund. https://doi.org/10.5089/9781484353783.001 

Legislation and case law 

European Union 
European Commission v Republic of Malta (Case C-181/23) (Court of Justice of the European Union [Grand Chamber], April 29, 2025). https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=celex%3A62023CJ0181 

Opinion of Advocate General Collins, European Commission v Republic of Malta (Case C-181/23) (Court of Justice of the European Union, October 10, 2024). 

Greece 
Law 4172/2013, Income Tax Code, Article 5A (Greece). 

Italy 
Presidential Decree No. 917/1986, Consolidated Income Tax Act (TUIR), Article 24-bis (Italy). (Article introduced by Law No. 232/2016, the 2017 Budget Law.) 
Decree-Law No. 113/2024 (converted by Law No. 143/2024) (Italy). 
Law No. 199/2025, 2026 Budget Law (Italy). 

Malta 
Income Tax Act, Chapter 123 of the Laws of Malta, Article 4 (Malta). 

Portugal 
Law No. 23/2007, of 4 July (Foreigners Act), Article 90-A (Portugal). (Golden visa investment options; Article 90-A inserted by Law No. 29/2012.) 
Law No. 56/2023, of 6 October (Mais Habitação) (Portugal). 
Organic Law No. 1/2026, of 18 May (Nationality Law) (Portugal). 

Spain 
Organic Law No. 1/2025, of 2 January (BOE-A-2025-76) (Spain). 

United Arab Emirates 
Federal Decree-Law No. 47 of 2022 on the Taxation of Corporations and Businesses (United Arab Emirates). https://tax.gov.ae/