Vienna is still the city with the highest quality of living according to the survey, followed by Zurich, Auckland and Munich.
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Vienna, Austria’s grand capital on the Danube river, offers the highest quality of life of all cities in the world, the survey says, while Iraqi capital Baghdad is at the bottom of the list.
Safety was a key determinant of quality of life, according to Mercer.
“Vienna has ranked top in the last seven published rankings”, said Mercer.
In that respect, Abu Dhabi is one of the safest cities in the world (#23 globally) and #1 regionally.
German-speaking cities dominated the rankings, with Scandinavian and European cities also featuring among the top 50.
Mercer conducts its Quality of Living survey annually to help multinational companies and other employers compensate employees fairly when placing them on global assignments. While the ranking of Sri Lanka’s capital Colombo is above Hyderabad by 6 ranks, at 132, Dhaka in Bangladesh is ranked 216 and Pakistan’s Islamabad, Lahore and Karachi are ranked 193, 199 and 202 respectively.
Damascus, five year’s into Syria’s bloody war, ranked six places above Baghdad, with Bangui in the Central African Republic, war-torn Yemen’s capital Sanaa, Haiti’s Port-au-Prince, Sudan’s Khartoum and Chad’s N’Djamena in between.
Vancouver was North America’s highest-ranking city, in 5th place, and Singapore was the highest ranking Asian city, coming in 26th place.
Dublin came 30th in a new personal safety ranking introduced by Mercer, based on a based on November 2015 survey – before the shootings at the Regency Hotel earlier this month. “These rankings take into account internal stability, crime figures, performance of local law enforcement, and the home country’s relationship with other countries”, the report explains. After suffering either terrorist attacks or social unrest in the last few years, cities like Paris (71st), London (72nd), Madrid (84th), and Athens (124th) now rank considerably lower than before.
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London and Edinburgh are the only United Kingdom cities to be ranked higher, while global centres like Kuala Lumpur and Seoul are lower.
