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July 05, 2023 at 10:51 AM
The Economist Intelligence Unit’s global livability index reached a 15-year high in the 2023 survey as the world moved on from the pandemic, and health care and education scores improved in Asia, the Middle East and Africa.
Cities in the Asia/Pacific region scored some of the biggest gains as economies recovered from pandemic setbacks. Meanwhile, Western European cities slipped down the rankings because of increased instances of workers’ strikes and civil unrest that hurt their stability ratings and failure to match gains made by Asian and Middle Eastern cities.
Kyiv returned to the survey this year after having been forced out by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. However, the city’s score fell by 5.9 percentage points since 2021 owing to the damage the war has done to its stability, infrastructure and general livability. The city ranks a lowly 165 out of the 173 cities in the survey. Moscow, which fell to 96th place in 2022, has remained stable this year.
Other cities at the bottom of the ranking, such as Lagos, Nigeria; and Algiers, Algeria, gained a bit of ground since last year, showing improvements in health care and education. But war-ravaged Damascus, the lowest-ranked city in the survey, showed no improvement in its livability scores despite the regional political comeback of Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad.
This year’s survey, conducted between Feb. 13 and March 12, found a noticeable improvement across the world. The average index score across all 172 cities in the survey (excluding Kyiv) reached 76.2 out of 100, up from 73.2 a year ago.
The EIU assigned each city a rating for relative comfort for 30 qualitative and quantitative factors across five broad categories: stability, health care, culture and environment, education and infrastructure.
Researchers then compiled and weighted the scores to provide a score from 1 to 100, where 1 is considered intolerable and 100 is considered ideal. The livability rating is provided both as an overall score and as a score for each category.
Health care scores 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 spots.
See the gallery for the world’s 11 most livable cities, according to EIU.
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