London - Germany is the most positively viewed nation in the world in this year's annual Country Ratings Poll for the BBC World Service.
BBC reports that more than 26,000 people were asked to rate 16 countries and the European Union on whether their influence in the world was "mainly positive" or "mainly negative". The survey was conducted for the BBC by GlobeScan and PIPA, who conducted interviews with randomly selected people in 25 countries.
Germany came out top, with 59% rating it positively. Iran was once again the most negatively viewed.
South Africa came in at the 11th position with 35% positive views and 30% negative.
Of those countries, 22 have been surveyed two years in a row, so become the tracking countries on which the average ratings are based.
These averages exclude the target country's rating of itself. So for example, the opinions of Germans on Germany are excluded, meaning the country's average rating is based on 21 tracking countries.
A three-point increase in Germany's average rating returned it to the top of the BBC list, displacing Japan, which saw its positive ratings drop from 58% to 51%, and fell from first to fourth place overall.
There were high positive ratings for Germany in recession-hit Spain and France - though not in Greece.
The UK saw a bigger increase in positive ratings than any other country and climbed to third place in the table, in the wake of its hosting of the 2012 Olympics.
The poll also indicates that positive views of China and India have fallen sharply around the world over the last year. After improving for several years, views of China have sunk to their lowest level since polling began in 2005, putting it in ninth position.
India is ranked 12th, with negative views (35%) slightly outnumbering positive ones (34%) for the first time.
Positive views of the EU dropped to their lowest level last year but have stabilised this year, rising one point to 49% on average.
Israel, North Korea, Pakistan and Iran came out worst in terms of how they are viewed globally. Only 15% of respondents said they saw Iran as having a mainly positive influence.
