World’s most liveable cities 2015

Economist has just published (August 18th) its 2015 list of world’s most liveable cities, and not surprisingly, Melbourne has again claimed the title 5th year in a row!  See others rankings in the tables and one thing worth noting from the ranking this year is …..

Economist Intelligence Unit’s (EIU) Global Liveability Ranking considers 30 factors related to things like safety (25%), culture and environment (25%), healthcare (20%), infrastructure (20%) and educational resources (10%), in 140 cities, shows that since 2010 average liveability across the world has fallen by 1%, led by a 2.2% fall in the score for stability and safety.  Ongoing conflicts in Syria, Ukraine and Libya have been compounded by terrorist shootings in France and Tunisia as well as civil unrest in America, these together with the latest bombings in Bangkok (guess will be reflected next year) have no doubt contribute to this downfall and particularly to the deterioration of the individual city’s ranking.  Let’s hope that we can see improvements in these factors in the future.  Apart from Economist’s study/survey ranking, there are at least 2 other similar liveable cities rankings – Mercer’s Quality of Living Ranking and Monocle’s Quality of Life Survey.  If you’re interested in these, Wiki’s article here is quite informative, also see the tables I extracted above.

My observations of a few cities are below:-

Hong Kong has seen a decline of 3.2 per cent in its liveability score over the last 12 months and has pushed Hong Kong 15 places down the ranking into 46th, just above Singapore in 49th place. The two city states are now separated by just 0.1 percentage points, with Hong Kong scoring 88.8 per cent and Singapore 88.7.

Beijing is amongst the “Ten of the best-the most improved liveability scores over five years”, improved its ranking score by 1.9 (to 76.2) and is now placed 69th.

It is also interesting that apart from general interest and good information to consider places to go and migrate, the ranking score is used by many companies for reference when sending their employees to work in the cities. The Economist Intelligence Unit has given a suggested allowance to correspond with the rating – e.g. a 5% allowance for cities with ranking scores between 70 to 80 (like Beijing).  But would you work in Syria for a 20% allowance?

Credit: information from Economist, Wikipedia and South China Morning Post.