Deciding which city is the best place to live in the world can be tricky business. There are so many factors to consider before you can hone in on that one special spot to call your home.
Luckily, the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) has conducted a bi-annual survey on livability in 140 cities around the world for the past 12 years and has just published its rankings of the best places to live in the world.
Jon Copestake is editor of the EIU’s cost of living and livability studies, as well as chief retail and consumer goods analyst. He knows what makes a city a best place to live for expats.
“We started out in 2002 primarily to determine if expats should be given hardship pay when they were moving from one location to another,” Copestake said. “Our survey still serves that function, but in 2007 we added a number of indicators to broaden the scope of the survey so that it could be perceived as more of a benchmarking study for our clients, mainly governments, corporations and non-governmental organizations (NGOs).”
Melbourne, Australia is the best place to live in the world in the EIU’s latest study, “A Summary of the Livability Ranking and Overview 2014.”
We asked Copestake why Melbourne always seems to be a top ranked city. “Well, Melbourne just presents very few challenges and has top scores in categories like education and healthcare and has relatively low crime levels, in comparison with other countries,” Copestake explained. “It also has quite a good culture, there are a lot of things to see and do. It hosts major global sporting events, it has a vibrant theater and restaurant scene and it is quite a diverse city. It ticks all the boxes well.”
He pointed out, though, that the scores of many of the top cities in the survey are quite close. In fact, #2 Vienna, Austria trails Melbourne, which has a score of 97.5, by one-tenth of a point and Vancouver, Canada is behind by just two-tenths of a point. Measured over the last five-year period, though, Vancouver is #1, Vienna #2 and Melbourne #3.
Other top 10 cities in the study are, in descending order, Toronto, Canada; Calgary, Canada; Adelaide, Australia; Sydney, Australia; Helsinki, Finland; Perth, Australia; and, Auckland, New Zealand.
Copestake said that the scores of top tier cities are quite close. Sixty-four cities have a score of 80 (100 is ideal) or better and #64, Santiago, Chile, trails Melbourne by less than 18 points.
The rankings are based on how well each city scores on 30 qualitative and quantitative factors across five weighted categories: Stability (30 percent), Healthcare (20 percent), Culture and Environment (25 percent), Education (10 percent) and Infrastructure (20 percent). Each category has a number of factors that contribute to the score. For example, the highest weighted category, Stability, is comprised of petty crime, prevalence of violent crime, threat of terror, threat of military conflict and threat of civil unrest/conflict factors.
“The five categories we use are fairly obvious to anyone who travels around the world,” Copestake told us. “In a sense, the list and weightings we came up with are intuitive. We came up with an internal consensus about the main things people would be looking at when they are relocating somewhere or planning to relocate.”
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