This year the Philippine capital lands at the 137th place, one place lower than last year. Vienna leads the ranking for the tenth year in a row, closely followed by Zurich. Auckland, Munich and Vancouver share third place. This is evident from the 21st edition of the Qualty of Living Cities Ranking that is being prepared by the consultancy firm Mercer. The top ten quality of life ranking is completed by the German cities of Düsseldorf (6) and Frankfurt (6), the Danish cities of Copenhagen (8) and the Swiss cities of Geneva (9) and Basel (10). It is also good to live in Sydney and Amsterdam, which both share eleventh place.
In Asia, Singapore (25) has the highest quality of living, followed by the five Japanese cities of Tokyo (49), Kobe (49), Yokohama (55), Osaka (58), and Nagoya (62), and then Hong Kong (71) and Seoul (77), which rose two places this year as political stability returned following the arrest of its president last year. In South East Asia, other notable cities include Kuala Lumpur (85), Bangkok (133), Manila (137), and Jakarta (142); and in mainland China: Shanghai (103), Beijing (120), Guangzhou (122) and Shenzhen (132).
Of all the cities in East and South East Asia, Singapore (30) ranked the highest in Asia and Phnom Penh (199) the lowest, for personal safety. Safety continues to be an issue in the central Asian cities of Almaty (181), Tashkent (201), Ashgabat (206), Dushanbe (209) and Bishkek (211).
In Southern Asia, the Indian cities of New Delhi (162), Mumbai (154) and Bengaluru (149) remained unchanged from last year’s ranking for overall quality of living, with Colombo (138) topping the ranking. In 105th place, Chennai ranks as the region’s safest city, while Karachi (226) is the least safe.
New Zealand and Australia continue to rank highly in quality of living, with Auckland (3), Sydney (11), Wellington (15), and Melbourne (17) all remaining in the top 20. Australia’s major cities all rank within the top 50 for safety, with Auckland and Wellington topping the safety ranking for Oceania in joint 9th place. At the very bottom, at number 231, Baghdad is dangling, although the Iraqi city, according to the researchers, has made considerable progress in terms of security and health care. Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic, is located just next to Sanaa in Yemen. Mercer draws up the quality of life ranking of 231 cities each year for companies that want to send expats. The ranking gives them insight into the quality of life of the various major cities worldwide and helps them, for example, in determining reimbursements. Personal freedom This year the consultancy also has a separate ranking in which the personal safety of individuals in the cities is examined. This includes looking at crime figures, law enforcement and freedom of the press. According to Mercer, personal freedom is the cornerstone of stability in every city, without which companies and talents cannot thrive. The safest city in the world appears to be small Luxembourg, followed by no fewer than four cities in a joint second place: Helsinki, Basel, Bern and Zurich. Bangui (230) and Damascus (231) are at the bottom. #MarketTrends #TopStories