Living in Madagascar

Madagascar's distance from the mainland shapes the working picture as much as anything: it is a French-speaking island economy where English reaches almost nobody. Pay and prices both rest at the low end of the global range, with tax barely touching what you earn, so a salary covers an ordinary life and not much beyond it. For an outsider the real test is access, since hiring tends to move through people who are already here.

Madagascar's diaspora settles overwhelmingly in France. Of 212.5K people abroad, 162.8K live there, far ahead of the nearby islands of Reunion and Mayotte. The diaspora grew 21% over the past decade.