• According to the Global Liveability Index of the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), Vienna in Austria has come up top again as the best city to live in.

• The Austrian capital slipped down our rankings in 2021, when its famous museums and restaurants faced restrictions to contain the pandemic, but this was a rare slip-up for a city that has now ranked top in eight of the past ten six-monthly surveys. 

• The city continues to offer an unsurpassed combination of stability, good infrastructure, strong education and healthcare services, and plenty of culture and entertainment, with one of its few downsides being a relative lack of major sporting events. 

• Denmark’s Copenhagen, secured the second spot, while Melbourne and Sydney in Australia, ranked third and fourth, respectively. Vancouver in Canada occupied the fifth spot.

• Five cities from India — New Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Ahmedabad and Chennai — are also in the list. New Delhi and Mumbai are tied at 141st position and Chennai at 144th, while Ahmedabad and Bengaluru are ranked 147 and 148 respectively.

• Damascus (Syria) and Tripoli (Libya) are still at the bottom of the list, held back by social unrest, terrorism and conflict. However, while Damascus has seen no improvement since last year, scores for Tripoli and other cities in the bottom ten have improved as the pandemic has receded.

• A shift back towards normality after the COVID-19 pandemic and incremental improvements in liveability made by many developing countries have been the biggest drivers of changes in EIU’s global liveability rankings.

• The survey shows a noticeable improvement across the world. The average index score across all 172 cities (excluding Kyiv) in the survey has now reached 76.2 out of 100, up from 73.2 a year ago. This is the highest score in 15 years for the original comparable list of 140 cities. 

• Healthcare scores have improved the most, with smaller gains for education, culture and environment and infrastructure.

• Only stability has seen a small decline, reflecting increasing perceptions of corruption and civil unrest in many cities amid a cost-of-living crisis, as well as an uptick in crime in some cities.

How is the Index prepared?

• The concept of liveability is simple: it assesses which locations around the world provide the best or worst living conditions. 

• Assessing liveability has a broad range of uses, from benchmarking perceptions of  development levels to assigning a hardship allowance as part of expatriate relocation packages. 

• Our liveability rating quantifies the challenges that might be presented to an individual’s lifestyle in any given location, and allows for direct comparison between locations.

• Every city is assigned a rating of relative comfort for over 30 qualitative and quantitative factors across five broad categories. They are: 

i) Stability

ii) Healthcare

iii) Culture and environment

iv) Education

v) Infrastructure. 

• Each factor in a city is rated as acceptable, tolerable, uncomfortable, undesirable or intolerable. For qualitative indicators, a rating is awarded based on the judgement of in-house analysts and in-city contributors. 

• For quantitative indicators, a rating is calculated based on the relative performance of a number of external data points.

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