Germany is the most positively viewed nation in the world in this year's annual Country Ratings Poll for the BBC World Service.

More than 26,000 people were surveyed internationally for the poll.They were asked to rate 16 countries and the European Union on whether their influence in the world was "mainly positive" or "mainly negative".

Germany came out top, with 59% rating it positively. Iran was once again the most negatively viewed. Global views of Europe's biggest country have improved significantly in 2013, according to the poll.

It was conducted for the BBC by GlobeScan and PIPA, who conducted face-to-face and telephone interviews with randomly selected people in 25 countries. 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.