More and more foreigners visit Moldova

Chisinau, 11 May /MOLDPRES/ – The number of crossings of Moldovan border by foreign citizens at the entrance to Moldova reached up to 701,9 thousand persons in the first quarter, up by 7.6 per cent compared to the same period of 2016, according to the National Bureau of Statistics’ (BNS) data.

More and more foreign citizens visit Moldova. It is the third consecutive year when their number is steadily increasing. There were 3.4 million crossings of the state border by foreign citizens in 2016, by 18.9 per cent more than in 2016.

According to the BNS’s public relations service, in the first three months of 2017 most of the foreign citizens crossing the state border came from Romania (60.9 per cent out of the total), followed by Ukraine with an amount of 26.4 per cent, the Russian Federation – 5.5 per cent, Bulgaria – 1.5 per cent. The foreign citizens who preferred to travel by car constituted 84.7 per cent of total crossings, air – 14.0 per cent and railroad – 1.3 per cent.

On the other hand, in January-March 2017, the number of crossings of the state border by the Moldovan citizens at the exit from Moldova constituted 1.1 million, that is 6.2 per cent less than in similar period of 2016.

The automobiles were most often used for departures abroad by Moldovan citizens, accounting for 87.1 per cent of the total crossings.

(Reporter V. Bercu, editor M. Jantovan)