Economic Citizenship: Is It Worthy Investment?

Year 2019, Volume: 3 Issue: 2, 76 - 98, 31.05.2019

Mustafa Şeref Akın

https://doi.org/10.25295/fsecon.2019.02.004

Abstract

The selling of economic citizenship is expanding and gradually becoming an industry. This paper weighs the cost-benefit analysis of economic citizenship in three aspects, visa-free country (VFC), marginal contribution and investment threshold aspects. The return on investment for the visa-free access is moderate, around 1-2% for a frequent traveler family and 0.2-0.5% for a frequent traveler single. Based on these analyses, unless an investor is a very frequent traveler, investment by citizenship programs are not feasible from visa-free country’s aspect. However, the benefits of acquiring economic citizenship from an EU country can compensate the low return on visa-free access. Under the marginal analysis, we eliminated the redundancy among passports and we calculated the additional benefits of an extra passport. This shows that acquiring a passport from developing countries is not meaningful for the citizens from developed countries. Under the investment threshold analysis, we demonstrated the minimum investment requirement. Some countries might be more advantageous for the return on investment along with citizenship, but they set the investment threshold so high that countries with donation might be more feasible.

Keywords

Economic Citizenship, Second Citizenship, Visa Free Countries, Investment

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