Thursday, April 19, 2007

World Cities with Highest Quality of Life

Zurich (pictured to left) and Geneva are the best cities in the world as far as quality of live is concerned, says Mercer Consulting in a survey published in April 2007. Vancouver (Canada) is placed third, followed by Vienna (Austria), Auckland (New Zealand), Düsseldorf (Germany) and Frankfurt (Germany). Paris, London and Madrid are in the lower half of the top-50 table. Overall, Baghdad is not surprisingly the lowest ranking city in the survey.
Other cities in Europe and Australia continue to dominate the top end of the rankings for overall quality of living. In fact, there are very few changes in the top half of the 2007 table. Auckland and Düsseldorf share joint fifth place and score 107.3 points. Frankfurt and Munich follow with scores of 107.1 and 106.9 respectively. Bern and Sydney both score 106.5 points and share joint 9th place. However, Paris is only ranked 33rd, with London in 39th place. Madrid improved from 45th, in 2006, to 42nd place in 2007. Oslo gains five places at the expense of Dublin, which drops to 27th place.
The analysis is based on an evaluation of 39 quality-of-living criteria for each city including political, social, economic and environmental factors, personal safety and health, education, transport and other public services.
Baghdad remains the world’s least enticing city for expatriates with a score of 14.5. Other low-scoring cities for overall quality of living include Brazzaville in Congo (29.5), Bangui in the Central African Republic (30.6) and Khartoum in Sudan (31).
The survey makes clear that in recent years, the gap between low-ranking and high-ranking cities had widened. “While standards have improved in some regions, there remains a stark contrast between those cities where overall quality of living is good and those experiencing political and economic turmoil,” the authors say. Source: CityMayors

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