Economic and trading group, Insider Monkey, has combined the findings from two separate surveys in race relations and compiled a ranking of the 25 most racist countries.

The two surveys cover different aspects of racism, but not racism directly – as the group points out, many people may not even know if they are racist.

The first survey was conducted by the Washington Post and broadly asked if people would like having people of other races as neighbours. Answers saying no were assumed to have some form of racial basis.

The second survey was more direct, asking whether respondents had seen or experienced racism. All answers that we not a direct “no not at all”, were considered as a check next to racism.

The findings cover the responses of over 85,000 people from 61 countries between 2014 and 2015.

South Africa was ranked as the 9th most racist country based on the survey results, where 19.6% of people said they would not like having people of different races living next door to them – while 61.8% of people said they had witnessed or experienced some form of racism.

Recent data released by the South African Institute for Justice and Reconciliation (IJR) showed that South Africans feel like race relations in the country have worsened since 1994 – however, contrasting data from the Institute of Race Relations (IRR) found the opposite had ocurred.

In 2015, IRR commissioned a national opinion survey of public attitudes to race, empowerment, and other policy issues entitled Race: What South Africans really think.

Insider Monkey said that individually, the surveys are too broad to give an indication of racism, which is incredibly complex to ‘define’ due to the subjectivity involved – and even when combined, the topic of ‘racism’ still isn’t comprehensive.

However, “when you combine two or more approaches it is more likely that some of these biases cancel out and the resulting estimate is more accurate,” it said.

One caveat to the data was that it only covered 61 countries. “It is highly likely that the rankings would be different if (Syria and Austria) and other excluded countries were part of the survey,” the group said.

It said it applied the same method as it does to to identify the best stocks to invest in the stock market, which it does by calculating the consensus picks of over 700 hedge fund managers.

These are the 25 most racist countries based on the results:

# Country % Who don’t want neighbours of another race % of people who witnessed racist behaviour 1 India 43.6 64.3 2 Lebanon 36.3 64.4 3 Bahrain 31.1 85.7 4 Libya 54.0 33.5 5 Egypt N/A 39.7 6 Philippines 30.6 49.1 7 Kuwait 28.1 37.9 8 Palestine 44.0 32.0 9 South Africa 19.6 61.8 10 South Korea 29.6 36.5 11 Malaysia 31.3 34.4 12 Nigeria 21.0 42.5 13 Iraq 27.7 37.8 14 Kyrgyzstan 28.1 35.9 15 Ecuador 34.5 32.0 16 Algeria 19.8 41.0 17 Pakistan 14.5 48.8 18 Yemen 34.0 31.2 19 Hong Kong 18.8 40.4 20 Russia 17.0 38.5 21 Thailand 39.8 19.0 22 Cyprus 26.7 26.1 23 Turkey 33.8 19.1 24 Morocco 13.8 35.6 25 Japan 22.3 29.7

More on race relations

What South Africans really think about racism and affirmative action

‘Racism’ is all the ANC has left: Zille

Racism can’t be cured: ANC

Most racism is from disaffected blacks: FW de Klerk Foundation