The 2016 State of the Global Islamic Economy Report revisits the Halal Media and Recreation Indicator to evaluate countries’ health and development of their family-friendly/Islamic media and recreation ecosystem. This indicator is part of the aggregate Global Islamic Economy (GIE) indicator.

The indicator does not focus on the overall size and growth trajectory of a country in the sector; instead it evaluates them on relative strengths of the ecosystem they have for the development of the sector.

The United Arab Emirates, Singapore and Bahrain lead this year’s Halal Media and Recreation Indicator ranking that focuses on the health of the family-friendly/Halal media and recreation ecosystem a country has relative to its size, including its related social considerations.

The indicator equally weighs three metric categories and has the following metrics for each: (Full methodology is presented in the Appendix.)

↘↘ Supply drivers relative to country size (recreation exports to OIC countries)

↘↘ Awareness (number of news articles and events)

↘↘ Social (Internet access Index)

 Below are the top 10 countries in the Halal Media and Recreation indicator.

The top 10 Muslim markets with Halal Media and Recreation expenditure were equally split

between Muslim-majority and Muslim minority countries. The top six included Turkey ($22.8 billion), the U.S. ($19.4 billion), Russia ($11.4 billion), Saudi Arabia ($9.8 billion), the UK ($9.4 billion) and Indonesia ($8.8 billion).

In addition to the U.S., Russia, and the UK, other Muslim-minority countries in the top 10 included France and Germany, which each spent $8.5 billion.