a new approach to measuring the liveability of cities: the global

176 World Review of Science, Technology and Sust. Development, Vol. 11, No. 2, 2014

Copyright © 2014 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.

A new approach to measuring the liveability of cities: the Global Liveable Cities Index

Tan Khee Giap* Asia Competitiveness Institute, Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore, 469A Bukit Timah Road, Level 2 Wing A, 259770, Singapore E-mail: [email protected] *Corresponding author

Woo Wing Thye Economics Department, University of California, One Shields Avenue, Davis, California 956161, USA E-mail: [email protected]

Grace Aw Mathematics and Statistics Department, Curtin University, Kent Street, Bentley 6102, Australia E-mail: [email protected]

Abstract: This paper advocates a new measure of liveability – the Global Liveable Cities Index (GLCI) – to rank the world’s major cities. The GLCI advances the measurement of the ‘liveability’ construct by taking into account the multidimensional sensibility of diverse groups of ordinary persons across 64 cities. The paper also compares the GLCI with six well known city indices from the literature and finds that the GLCI performs as a relevant liveability indicator for diverse groups of ordinary persons. In addition, the paper conducts policy simulations to find that city planners interested in attracting talent of a given personality type can invest in areas with low scores in the GLCI.

Keywords: economic competitiveness; liveability; city benchmarking.

Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Giap, T.K., Thye, W.W. and Aw, G. (2014) ‘A new approach to measuring the liveability of cities: the Global Liveable Cities Index’, World Review of Science, Technology and Sustainable Development, Vol. 11, No. 2, pp.176–196.

Biographical notes: Tan Khee Giap is co-Director in Asia Competitiveness Institute and Associate Professor in Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore, Singapore.

A new approach to measuring the liveability of cities 177

Woo Wing Thye is Professor in Department of Economics, University of California, Davis and Adjunct Senior Research Fellow at ACI-LKYSPP, Singapore.

Grace Aw is Senior Lecturer in Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Curtin University of Technology, Australia and Adjunct Research Fellow at ACI-LKYSPP, Singapore.

1 Introduction

The last few decades have seen the world becoming more urbanised. With more than half of the world’s population living in urban areas in 2011 from about 30% in 1950, it is projected that the urban areas in the world will host 70% of the world’s population by 2050. While considerable heterogeneity exists in the levels of urbanisation across different regions of the world, the Asian region stands out as having the potential to see half of its population live in the urban areas by 2020 (United Nations, 2011). Furthermore, the future urban population is expected to be increasingly concentrated in large cities of one million or more inhabitants, with the megacities consisting of at least 10 million inhabitants experiencing the largest percentage increase. As the United Nations (2011) notes, such increasing urban concentration in very large cities is a relatively new phenomenon that the world is experiencing which also highlights the growing need to focus on the quality of living in such cities.

A central feature of this rising urbanisation has been the growing importance of cities as a locus of economic activity. Over the last few decades, with globalisation leading to the intensification of cross-border mobility not just of goods and financial capital but also of labour and human talents, there has also been a marked rise in interconnectivity among cities, primarily due to advancements in transportation and telecommunication technology. To be sure, a combination of attractive infrastructure and supporting regulatory environments have helped cities compete for global talents, resources and capital, positioning themselves as a platform for innovations to occur and ideas to grow.

‘Liveability’ is one key characteristic of cities that enable them to attract a disproportionate amount of the globally-mobile resources (such as talents, high net worth individuals, investors, innovators, entrepreneurs, and capital) that are recognised to make positive contributions to economic growth, economic resilience, global political influence, world agenda-setting power, socio-cultural innovation, and international lifestyle impact. As competition among cities is considered as strategic as competition between nations, the city that fares well in the competition becomes an epicentre for advanced economic and cultural activities while those that lack the required standards of competitiveness shrink economically and become irrelevant (Tan et al., 2012).

Thus, the growing popular interest in the liveability of cities [examples of bestsellers on cities in the last two decades are Sassen (1991) and Glaeser (2011)] has also led to an increasing desire to rank the liveability of cities that will help policy makers frame appropriate policies. The accelerated globalisation has also reinforced our understanding that the agglomeration of activities by cities constitutes powerful growth engines. In the words of Glaeser (2011) ‘cities magnify humanity’s strength’ as they improve enable socio-economic mobility by creating opportunities, and inducing innovation by easing

178 T.K. Giap et al.

face-to-face engagements. An increasing recognition of the importance of global competition amongst cities in attracting all forms of capital has also been acknowledged by the OECD (2007) in its Competitive Cities Report. The rise in global competition is also reflected in the increasing popularity of city benchmarking as well, of which notions of liveability form an important component.

In recent years, a number of liveability and benchmarking indices and studies have been published to assess the relative position of various global cities against each other in various categories. These liveability measures are typically used as a tool to make comparisons between cities with various outcome scores receiving widespread media attention. However, none of the existing indices take the perspective of the ordinary man living in that city and model this ordinary person as having multi-dimensional sensibilities towards issues like economic well-being, social mobility, personal security, political governance, environmental sustainability, and aesthetics. This paper advocates a new measure of liveability to rank the world’s major cities – the Global Liveable Cities Index (GLCI) first introduced by Tan et al. (2012). Section 2 begins with a discussion about the various definitions of liveability and briefly examines the limited literature. Section 3 provides the theoretical basis for the proposed GLCI. Section 4 performs a comparison of the proposed index with six well-known and widely employed indicators from the literature and Section 5 concludes.

2 Defining ‘liveability’ – related literature

There is no established theoretical framework laying out a uniform definition of liveability. As such, the literature has a handful of empirical studies that broadly involve a direct comparison of a composite measure of liveability over different geographic areas and generate rankings categorising the liveability of cities.

However, a broad understanding of the notion of liveability appears to have emerged, though there is no consensus on the specificities of its scope. A very useful working definition of urban liveability comes from Vuchic (1999, p.7) who defines it as “…generally understood to encompass those elements of home, neighborhood, and metropolitan area that contribute to safety, economic opportunities and welfare, health, convenience, mobility, and recreation”. The concept of livability is clearly more a qualitative construct representing a set of characteristics that relate to the attractiveness of an area as a ‘desirable’ place to live, work, invest, and conduct business.

Liveability in many ways could be viewed as encompassing a wide range of issues relating to overall ‘quality of life and well-being’. It is intuitive to understand it as a ‘place-based’ concept that generally refers to those elements of a home, neighbourhood, or city that contribute to quality of life and well-being. Quality of life and well-being are closely related concepts that relate to the dimensions on which an individual’s living condition or state can be measured. They can range from the more objective indicators of economic wellbeing, such as human capital, to the more subjective quality of life indicators that include social capital, qualitative expressions of personal satisfaction and the like (Ley and Newton, 2010).

Interestingly, liveability as represented by human well-being and the quality of city’s physical environment is derived in turn from the performance of key urban systems and processes in the cities where people live and work. This is what that gives rise to several indicators in the literature that are intended operate as broad proxies to measure and judge


the degree of liveability of a city/area. Indicators as to whether the housing market provides appropriate and affordable housing or whether the transport system provides a high level of mobility and connectivity without high levels of car dependency etc are indicators that help measure the quality of life in a city are examples of such proxies measuring liveability. Thus to put it in another way, the notion of ‘liveability’ is used to describe the overall contribution of the urban environment in influencing the quality of life or wellbeing of residents (Urbis, 2008).

That being said, liveability as used in the literature has also been broadly equated with sustainable development, for most indicators that are used to measure liveability invariably fall under the ambit of a ‘cleaner, safer and greener” environment that falls under the rubric of sustainable development in the policy discourse. In fact, as Ley and Newton (2010) emphasise, the concept of liveability is considered one of the four key domains central to the notion of sustainable urban development, the others being environmental sustainability, economic performance, and good governance. As some studies show, in many advanced economies like the UK for instance, liveability has been adopted in a much narrower and more operational sense and has to do with high degrees of ‘cleanliness, safety and green-friendliness’. Though such a broad definition may well be considered an ‘umbrella’ term that encompasses a number of inter-related issues, its overwhelming focus appears to be on the local environment.

However, as Woolcock (2009) argues, the link between liveability and sustainable development is not very clear either. In some cases the two terms are being used interchangeably while in other contexts, liveability is being considered as a subset of a sustainable city. A literature scan by Lyndhurst (2004) for example on the various definitions of liveability, concludes that there is a general lack of consensus in the research and policy literature about the possible interplay between liveability and sustainable development and that little attention is being paid to the possibility that both the concepts could have ‘mutually reinforcing’ as well as ‘potentially conflicting’ elements.

3 Analytical basis of the GLCI

City benchmarking can be conceptualised as measuring and monitoring the performance of cities against a number of comparable and/or best practice cities. As Luque-Martinez and Munoz-Leiva (2005) summarise, city benchmarking is “the systematic continuous method that consists of identifying, learning and implementing the most effective practices and capacities from other cities in order to improve one’s own city to improve its action in what it offer”.

While a considerable number of indices on city benchmarks already exist in the literature, none of them model liveability from the perspective of an ordinary person. We briefly review the following five empirical frameworks discussed in detail in Tan et al. (2012), which are most relevant to developing the empirical framework for GLCI:

• World Competitiveness Yearbook

• Mercer Human Resource’s Worldwide Quality of Living Survey

• Yale & Columbia University’s 2005 Environment Sustainability Index


• The Global City Indicators Program

• Indicators of Sustainable Development: Guidelines & Methodology

The World Competitiveness Yearbook’s focus is on countries and their economic competitiveness, while the Mercer study’s focus is on the quality of living across cities for expatriates. As for the Yale & Columbia study, its focus is on environment sustainability with an emphasis on ‘green’ indicators and international initiatives but does not address the issue of quality of life.

The Global City Indicators Program aims to provide an established set of city indicators with a globally standardised methodology that allows for comparability of performance. The primary focus is to measure the social well-being of citizens and its indicators range from healthcare and transportation to technology. However, it has limited coverage of government leadership and factors like policy making and its implementation as well as corruption and foreign affairs are all neglected.

Indicators of Sustainable Development are an attempt to measure the progress towards sustainable development and encompass themes such as poverty, governance, health, education and economic development. Though this index provides a multi-dimensional nature for measuring sustainability, its approach used is more suited for measuring a single nation’s development rather than for making comparisons between cities.

Since human nature is complex, the concept of liveability is necessarily a complex one. At the very least, the concept of ‘liveability’ has to be multi-dimensional in the same way that human nature is. In developing the GLCI, we model an ordinary person with multi-dimensional sensibilities towards issues like economic well-being, social mobility, personal security, political governance, environmental sustainability, and aesthetics for a more representative coverage of major cities around the world. The GLCI offers one such index which could be highly useful for policy making.

The ordinary-resident’s-perspective approach of GLCI makes GLCI substantially different from most other well-known liveability rankings of cities like the Mercer Quality of Living Survey, and the Knight Frank Global Cities Survey. The GLCI explicitly takes into account a comprehensive list of the everyday concerns of the ordinary household: the maintenance of law and order, the availability of affordable healthcare, the average quality of the public school system, the accessibility to tertiary level training, and the adequacy of the mass transit infrastructure. In short, this paper is an attempt to broaden the scope of earlier studies by others within an encompassing theoretical as well as empirical framework, laid out in Tan et al. (2012).

Tan et al. (2012) ranks the liveability of cities by capturing the multi-dimensional character of liveability in five themes to operationalise measurement. These five themes have their theoretical basis in the social sciences, humanities and natural philosophy. Specifically, they are:

1 economic vibrancy and competitiveness

2 domestic security and stability

3 socio-cultural conditions

4 public governance

5 environmental friendliness and sustainability.


The sequence of the five themes is not in any order of perceived priority or indicative of their relative importance. Together, they provide a conceptual framework of liveability in accordance with various depictions of the nature of man in the social sciences and humanities (with all the five categories equally weighted in the index).

Given the fundamental importance of ecological sustainability in the concept of liveability, we present a discussion of an important issue that differentiates our worldview from that of many other studies that rank cities or countries. The defining issue that divides us from many others is about how to measure ecological sustainability at the city level and at the country-level. Indicators for category 1 are the usual hard economic data related to its openness and pro-business policies which should be readily available in the public domain. Indicators in category 2 would typical involve proxies such as crime rate, social harmony, civil unrest, threats to domestic security and stability. Indicators for category 3 on quality of life and diversity would entail public services such as affordable health care, education, public housing, sanitation and transportation as well as income disparity, demography burden and community cohesion. Indicators on category 4, being more difficult to quantify, would rely heavily on survey data pertaining to quality of government, policy effectiveness, transparency and accountability, fair and efficient justice system.

Indicators in category 5 would involve technical indicators usually covering pollution, green spaces, recycling rate and water quality (see Tan et al., 2012). While the first four indicators are generally well-discussed in the literature, we focus on category 5.

3.1 Environmental friendliness and sustainability

We take the viewpoint that sustainability at the city level should be measured by the extent that a city implements the principle of ‘think globally and act locally’. Specifically, our analytical position is that, in an interdependent world of nation states, there are two components that should be accounted for while defining ecological sustainability:

a ecological sustainability always means ecological sustainability at the global level

b ecological sustainability at the local level should not always be equated with local self-sufficiency in meeting the needs of the local community.

The first component tells us to ‘think globally’. The second component tells us ‘to act locally in a way that is consistent with maximum global welfare’ because if the local action is not consistent with the global optimum, then the whole world is made worse off.

To see the saliency of the second component, consider the recent study conducted by the Fisheries Centre at the University of British Columbia (UBC, 2012) which computed an ‘Eco2 Index’ to aggregate the economic deficit and the ecological deficit of a country. The ecological deficit measures “resource consumption and waste produced by a country in comparison to its carrying capacity as expressed in locally available resources such as agricultural land and energy”. The primary problem with this UBC index is that a country like the UK that imports most of its food and energy would thus have a bad score on its ecological sustainability performance, while a food exporter like Myanmar would have a high score on ecological sustainability. Physically small countries (and city states in particular), like Bermuda, Curacao, Malta, Singapore and Switzerland, that have gotten rich through active participation in international trade are hence by definition


ecologically un-sustainable. Herein lies the structural flaw of the UBC index: the Eco2 Index holds that self-sufficiency is a desired condition in and of itself. Such a viewpoint is fundamentally a reflection of a survivalist creed: today’s friend can be tomorrow’s enemy and hence a city should never be reliant on the possible fickleness of others. In short, the Eco2 Index would identify the best world economic order to be an autarkic world order. Furthermore, since a city normally relies on the countryside for food, the application of the Eco2 Index at the city-level would yield the conclusion that the best national economic system would be a nation of self-subsistence farmers.

We explicitly reject the survivalist philosophy that the potential for self-sufficiency in food and energy production is the appropriate measure of the sustainability of a city or country. This survivalist mentality is at odds with the insights of Adam Smith and David Ricardo that identify specialisation in production as the basis for wealth creation in normal times. It is only during abnormal times (like the periods of worldwide conflicts) where there is virtual suspension of international trade is the survivalist criteria the correct indicator for sustainability. But we are not interested in doing a ranking of liveability that applies only during abnormal times when autarky is externally imposed. The kind of country/city ranking studies that is exemplified by the report of the Fisheries Centre of the UBC (2012) should more appropriately be called ‘rankings of survival-bility’ or, simply, ‘rankings of self-sufficiency’. In our thinking, however, living life to the fullest is meaningful only if life is more than mere survival.

The survivalist interpretation of sustainability is really unsuitable to the modern world. If drastic climate changes were to occur abruptly in the food-exporting parts of the world and trigger protectionism, a nation of subsistence farmers would, indeed, escape largely unscathed from the meltdown of the world food market. However, this autarkic nation would still not survive a global nuclear Armageddon. The present reality is that the practice of self-sufficiency will not guarantee survival in a world with nuclear arms. So if we update the survivalist philosophy to present circumstances, the Eco2 Index should measure sustainability of a country by, one, the amount of effort that country’s government puts into the campaign for a global ban on nuclear weapons; and, two, by how far the country is from the closest country with nuclear arms (because this closest nuclear-armed country has a higher probability of being a first-strike target by other nuclear-armed countries).

We would like to propose in this paper that ecological sustainability is better guaranteed by the practice of ‘think globally, and act locally’. We make this point by considering the case of the emission of greenhouse gases like CO2 by a country. It is clear that the best contribution that a country could make to the global situation (from thinking globally) is to minimise its annual emission of GHG, which we denote as G, measured in parts per million (ppm) per year.

Now, what is to be done locally in order to reduce G (or, at least, keep the growth rate of G at a minimum)? The value of G, the additional amount of GHG in the air each year, is determined by the PIES-in-the-sky equation:

G P*I*E *S=

where

P population size

I income per capita, i.e., GDP/P


E energy inefficiency defined as amount of energy (in Joules, J) consumed in producing a unit of GDP, i.e., J/GDP

S soiling capacity of the energy used defined as amount of GHG added by each unit of energy consumed, i.e., G/J

So we have:

G P*(GDP / P)*(J / GDP)*(G / J)=

or

G P*(GDP / P)*(G / GDP).=

For any emerging economy, responsible global citizenship would have its policy makers enact policies that would lower (J/GDP), (G/J) and P, i.e., increase energy efficiency, switch to green energy, and strengthen the family planning program. As the average income (I) of an emerging economy is still way below the levels in Western Europe and North America, the obligation of the government to its own citizens is to continue to let output (I) grow as fast as conditions permit. The faster that output grows, the more the government should do to reduce energy inefficiency (E), the use of dirty energy (S) and the rate of population growth (P). In short, the policy target that flows naturally from responsible global citizenship (‘thinking globally and acting locally’) and from the right of countries (especially of the poorer countries) to grow is the emission-GDP ratio (G/GDP) rather than the per capita amount of emission (G/P).1

The policy agenda that follows from the survivalist interpretation of sustainability differs significantly from our above policy agenda. It seems straightforward that the implementation of self-sufficiency in food and energy would reduce the growth of GHG emission by reducing the growth of output (I) because output is creased by international trade. However, this GHG-reduction outcome from switching to a self-sufficiency regime is far from certain. In the cases of China and India, energy sufficiency would require these two countries to switch from imported oil to domestic coal, and to generate more hydropower by building more Three Gorges Dam-type of projects.2 This means that the only way that India and China could attain energy sufficiency without emitting even more GHG and tearing up more of their natural environments would be if there were revolutionary technological breakthroughs in solar power, wind power, and carbon-capture-and-sequestration. Such technological breakthroughs are, however, just as likely to occur under the ‘think globally, and act locally’ policy regime as under the self-sufficiency policy regime. Of course, the actual measure of ‘environmental friendliness and sustainability’ (‘the state of the natural environment and its management’) used in constructing our GLCI takes many more factors into consideration and not just the value of (GHG/GDP). The above discussion on GHG is only meant to illustrate the basic differences in philosophy that guide the measurement of ecological sustainability in our GLCI study and some other major studies, e.g. the global-citizen approach versus the survivalist approach. Our measure of ‘environmental friendliness and sustainability’ is constructed from 15 environmental sustainability indicators at the city level; and these 15 indicators could be grouped under three categories:

1 extent of air and water pollution

2 extent of depletion of natural resources


3 extent of government involvement in efforts to protect the environment.

3.2 Indicators of GLCI

The indicators used to reflect each of the five categories in the GLCI are shown in Tables 1–5 respectively. Table 1 Indicators for economic vibrancy and competitiveness

Economic performance Economic openness Infrastructure GDP Foreign direct investment

(percentage of GDP) Telephone lines

(subscribers per 100 people) Real GDP growth rate Trade to GDP ratio Computer ownership

(per 1,000 people) Labour productivity per hour State ownership of

enterprises (index) Level of internet access (percentage population)

Household consumption expenditure per capita

Prevalence of trade barriers (index)

Unemployment rate Number of free trade agreements

Resilience of economy (index) Ease of doing business (index) Gross fixed capital formation (percentage of GDP)

Prevalence of foreign ownership (index)

Growth rate of consumer price index

Tourism receipts (percentage of GDP)

Debt to gross national income ratio

Economic freedom (index)

Hotel occupancy rates International tourist arrivals

Table 2 Indicators for environmental friendliness and sustainability

Pollution Depletion of natural resources Environment initiatives

Greenhouse gas emissions Electricity generated from renewable sources (percentage of total electricity generated)

Participation in selected international environmental

agreements (out of total of 11) Sulphur dioxide emission Consumption of oil per day Stringency of environmental

regulations (index) CO2 emissions in 2006 Threatened species (percentage

of total animal species) Terrestrial protected area

(percentage of total land area) Quality of the natural environment (index)

Protected marine area (percentage of total marine area)

Water pollution (kilograms per day per worker)

Enforcement of environmental

regulation (index) Nitrogen oxide emission Particulate matter concentration


Table 3 Indicators for domestic security and stability

Crime rate Threats to national stability Civil unrest Number of homicide cases (per 10,000 capita)

Business costs of terrorism (survey)

Severity of political violence (index)

Number of new drug offences (per 100,000 capita)

Fatalities of terrorist attacks (per million capita)

Conflicts of ethnic, religious, regional nature (index)

Business cost of crime and violence (index)

Natural disaster death toll (per million capita)

Violent social conflicts (index)

Reliability of police services (index)

Table 4 Indicators for socio-cultural conditions

Medical and healthcare Education Housing, sanitation

and transportation

Income quality and demographic

burden

Diversity and community cohesion

Infant mortality rate

Quality of education

system (index)

Percentage of urban population living in slums

GINI index Percentage of foreigners/

percentage of immigrants

Life expectancy Tertiary enrolment rate

Percentage of population using

improved sanitation

Number of hours worked per year

(index)

Number of religions (index)

Government health expenditure per capita

Government expenditure on

education

Population using an improved water source

Human poverty index

Attitudes towards foreign visitors (index)

Number of hospital beds (per 1,000 population)

Higher education

achievement

Quality of ground transport network

(index)

Child dependency ratio

Density of physicians (per 10,000 population)

Quality of roads (index)

Old age dependency ratio

Quality of railroad infrastructure (index)

Quality of electricity supply (index)

Table 5 Indicators for political governance

Policy making and implementation Government system Transparency and

accountability Corruption

Government effectiveness (index)

Functioning of government system

(index)

Transparency of economic policy

(index)

Control of corruption

(index) Government consumption expenditure (percentage of GDP)

Effectiveness of judicial system (index)

Voice and accountability

(index)

Corruption perceptions index

(index) Collected total tax revenues (percentage of GDP)

Quality of e-government (index)

Regulatory quality (index) Political stability no violence (index)

Rule of law (index)


4 City ranking and policy simulations

Table 6 shows the overall ranking for 64 global cities [with details for individual ranking by the five categories found in Tan et al. (2012) Chapter 3]. Of the 64 global cities, five Asian cities are in the top 20. They are Singapore, Hong Kong, Osaka-Kobe, Tokyo and Yokohama. Table 6 Overall ranking for 64 global cities

City Region Overall

liveability City Region Overall

liveability Score Rank Score rank

Geneva Europe 3.40 1 Kuala Lumpur Asean 32.00 32 Zurich Europe 4.60 2 Rome Europe 34.00 34 Singapore Asean 5.60 3 Amman Mid East 36.60 35 Copenhagen Europe 7.00 4 Jerusalem Asia 37.00 36 Helsinki Europe 7.00 4 Sao Paulo S. America 43.40 37 Luxembourg Europe 7.80 6 Riyadh Mid East 44.00 38 Stockholm Europe 8.20 7 Shanghai Asia 45.00 39 Berlin Europe 11.20 8 Nanjing Asia 45.20 40 Hong Kong Asia 11.20 8 Bangkok Asean 45.80 41 Auckland Oceania 11.60 10 Shenzhen Asia 45.80 41 Melbourne Oceania 11.60 10 Ahmedabad Asia 46.00 43 Sydney Oceania 12.00 12 Cairo Mid East 46.00 43 Paris Europe 12.40 13 Tianjin Asia 47.40 45 Vancouver N. America 16.20 14 Beijing Asia 47.80 46 Amsterdam Europe 16.80 15 Chennai Asia 48.20 47 Osaka-Kobe Asia 17.80 16 Guangzhou Asia 48.20 47 New York N. America 18.20 17 Pune Asia 48.20 47 Tokyo Asia 18.60 18 Mexico City N. America 48.40 50 Los Angeles N. America 18.80 19 Damascus Mid East 48.60 51 Philadelphia N. America 21.40 20 Chongqing Asia 48.80 52 Yokohama Asia 21.40 20 Hanoi Asean 48.80 52 Boston N. America 21.60 22 Ho Chi Minh City Asean 48.80 52 London Europe 21.60 22 Bangalore Asia 49.00 55 Chicago N. America 22.40 24 Mumbai Asia 49.00 55 Washington DC N. America 22.80 25 Delhi Asia 50.20 57 Barcelona Europe 23.20 26 Buenos Aires S. America 50.60 58 Taipei Asia 24.00 27 Istanbul Mid East 52.20 59 Prague Europe 25.80 28 Karachi Mid East 53.00 60 Seoul Asia 26.20 29 Phnom Penh Asean 53.80 61 Madrid Europe 27.00 30 Moscow Europe 55.20 62 Incheon Asia 27.40 31 Manila Asean 56.60 63 Abu Dhabi Mid East 32.00 32 Jakarta Asean 57.40 64

Source: Tan et al. (2012, Table 21, pp.52–53)


In particular for economic vibrancy and competitiveness, Hong Kong and Singapore are ranked fourth and fifth, respectively, among the top 20 global cities. Of the other categories, Singapore tops the list only for domestic security and stability, while being third in political governance, fifth in social-cultural conditions and 14th in environmental friendliness and sustainability. Table 7 Overall ranking for 64 global cities after simulation

City Region Overall

liveability City Region Overall

liveability Before After Before After

Geneva Europe 1 1 Kuala Lumpur Asean 32 23 Zurich Europe 2 1 Rome Europe 34 29 Singapore Asean 3 1 Amman Mid East 35 30 Copenhagen Europe 4 1 Jerusalem Asia 36 26 Helsinki Europe 4 1 Sao Paulo S. America 37 32 Luxembourg Europe 6 4 Riyadh Mid East 38 35 Stockholm Europe 7 1 Shanghai Asia 39 34 Berlin Europe 8 2 Nanjing Asia 40 34 Hong Kong Asia 8 4 Bangkok Asean 41 36 Auckland Oceania 10 2 Shenzhen Asia 41 35 Melbourne Oceania 10 5 Ahmedabad Asia 43 37 Sydney Oceania 12 4 Cairo Mid East 43 35 Paris Europe 13 8 Tianjin Asia 45 37 Vancouver N. America 14 6 Beijing Asia 46 37 Amsterdam Europe 15 8 Chennai Asia 47 37 Osaka-Kobe Asia 16 9 Guangzhou Asia 47 37 New York N. America 17 12 Pune Asia 47 37 Tokyo Asia 18 8 Mexico City N. America 50 37 Los Angeles N. America 19 12 Damascus Mid East 51 37 Philadelphia N. America 20 14 Chongqing Asia 52 37 Yokohama Asia 20 14 Hanoi Asean 52 35 Boston N. America 22 14 Ho Chi Minh City Asean 52 37 London Europe 22 10 Bangalore Asia 55 37 Chicago N. America 24 14 Mumbai Asia 55 37 Washington DC N. America 25 14 Delhi Asia 57 37 Barcelona Europe 26 15 Buenos Aires S. America 58 37 Taipei Asia 27 20 Istanbul Mid East 59 37 Prague Europe 28 16 Karachi Mid East 60 37 Seoul Asia 29 16 Phnom Penh Asean 61 37 Madrid Europe 30 15 Moscow Europe 62 53 Incheon Asia 31 19 Manila Asean 63 39 Abu Dhabi Mid East 32 22 Jakarta Asean 64 41

While rankings are useful, a notable innovation of the Tan et al. (2012) study lies in policy simulations to explore the extent to which the city is able to improve on its


liveability ranking. The simulation is based on two policy assumptions, one being that each city will work on areas where their rankings are worst, in order to improve. This is identified by their lowest (worst-performing) 20% of the indicators which are selected from the entire list of indicators regardless of which category they belong to.3 The bottom 20% is picked to focus on because of limited resources to work on all areas concurrently.

The second policy assumption is that, after identifying the 20% most lagging indicators, policies as devised for implementation to raise their scores are simulated to the ‘average’ score of a particular indicator for all cities (computed using the original data). As the simulation is static where the ranks are computed assuming only a particular city improves at a time holding all other cities’ scores constant, all cities’ rankings after the simulation will never decline.

The simulation shows the potential for improvement by a change in overall rankings before and after simulation. Apart from their usefulness to policy-makers, results of the simulation will also help the business community, potential investors and residents. Information on potential liveability will enable informed choices and decision-making on business ventures, including migration for better competitiveness by all.

Table 7 presents the results of policy simulations undertaken. As we can see from the table, Singapore emerges as the only Asian city tying as first with Geneva, Zurich, Copenhagen, Helsinki and Stockholm in the overall rankings. Equally interesting is the dramatic improvement or catch-up by many cities like Chicago from 34 to 5, Shanghai from 45 to 20 and Amman from 48 to 20. The rise of Abu Dhabi from 32 to 22 is another proof of how poor performance before simulation is greatly enhanced by policies.

4.1 GLCI and other city ranking indices – a comparison

In this section, we present a comparison of the GLCI with six other popular city indices used in the literature , by picking the top 10 cities of each index. The other six indices considered for the study are:

1 the Global Power City Index by the Mori Memorial Foundation (2011), i.e., the Mori Index

2 the Global Cities Index jointly by the Foreign Policy magazine, The Chicago Council on Global Affairs, A.T. Kearney (2010), i.e., the Foreign Policy Index

3 the Global Cities Index jointly by Frank (2011a) and (2011b) and Citi Private Bank, i.e., the Knight Frank Index

4 the Global City Competitiveness Index jointly by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU, 2011a) and CitiGroup, i.e., the EIU-Competitiveness Index

5 the Quality of Living Index by Mercer (2011), i.e., the Mercer Index

6 the Liveability Ranking issued by EIU (2011b), i.e., the EIU-Liveability Index.

Table 8 reports the ten top-rated cities according to the above six city indices and GLCI.4 Given that there is some overlap in the contents of each index, the seven city indices contain 34 different cities. The number of times that a city appears in the indices, i.e., a city citation record is shown in Table 9 while Table 10 shows how many indices that a particular index overlaps with, i.e., an index citation record.


Table 8 The top 10-ranked cities in each city index

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Table 9 Citation record of each city

City Frequency mentioned Listed in top ten in the city index of

Singapore 5 Mori, Foreign Policy, Knight Frank, EIU-C, GLCI

Hong Kong 4 Mori, Foreign Policy, EIU-C, GLCI

London 4 Mori, Foreign Policy, Knight Frank, EIU-C

New York City 4 Mori, Foreign Policy, Knight Frank, EIU-C

Paris 4 Mori, Foreign Policy, Knight Frank, EIU-C

Tokyo 4 Mori, Foreign Policy, Knight Frank, EIU-C

Auckland 3 EIU-L, Mercer, GLCI

Berlin 3 Mori, Knight Frank, GLCI

Zurich 3 EIU-C, Mercer, GLCI

Chicago 2 Foreign Policy, EIU-C

Copenhagen 2 Mercer, GLCI

Frankfurt 2 Mori, Mercer

Geneva 2 Mercer-GLCI

Helsinki 2 EIU-L, GLCI

Los Angeles 2 Foreign Policy, Knight Frank

Melbourne 2 EIU-L, GLCI

Seoul 2 Mori, Foreign Policy

Sydney 2 Foreign Policy, EIU-L

Toronto 2 Knight Frank, EIU-L

Vancouver 2 EIU-L, Mercer

Vienna 2 EIU-L, Mercer

Adelaide 1 EIU-L

Amsterdam 1 Mori

Beijing 1 Knight Frank

Bern 1 Mercer

Boston 1 EIU-C

Brussels 1 Knight-Frank

Calgary 1 EIU-L

Dusseldorf 1 Mercer

Luxembourg 1 GLCI

Munich 1 Mercer

Perth 1 EIU-L

Stockholm 1 GLCI

Washington DC 1 EIU-C

Notes: EIU-C = EIU-Competiveness EIU-L = EIU-Liveability


Table 10 Citation record of each city index

City index Number of indices with which this index has overlap

Number of cities in this index which appears in other indices

GLCI 6 9 Foreign Policy 5 9 Mori 5 8 Knight Frank 5 8 EIU-Competitiveness 5 7 EIU-Liveability 4 6 Mercer 3 5

Together, Tables 8, 9 and 10 allow two interesting conclusions. First, there is not too much overlap in top-10 cities of seven indices. Singapore is the most cited city appearing in five of the seven indices, and Hong Kong, London, New York City, Paris and Tokyo appear in four indices. Twenty-eight out of 34 cities appear in less than half of the indices.

Second, seven indices fall into three categories: clout club indices, comfort club indices and balanced club indices.

• The clout club: There is a very large overlap of the top-10 cities in the Mori Index, Foreign Policy Index and Knight Frank Index. Their top four cities are the same, namely, New York, London, Paris and Tokyo. These four cities are also in top-10 lists of the EIU-Competitiveness Index, but not in the EIU-Liveability Index, the Mercer Index and the GLCI. Since New York, London, Paris and Tokyo are strong global centres of financial power, economic prowess, political influence, social status and cultural leadership, we can describe the Mori Index, Foreign Policy Index, Knight Frank Index and EIU-Competitiveness Index as ‘clout club indices’ and their top-10 cities as clout club cities.

• The comfort club: Both the EIU-Liveability and the Mercer indices originate as guidelines to the personnel departments in multinational corporations in the dispensation of hardship pay. As these two indices emphasise ‘pleasant living’, we call them ‘comfort club indices’; and the top 10 cities in each index as the comfort club cities. We note, however, that these two self-professed ‘pleasantness-of-living’ indices have very little overlap. Their respective top-10 lists share only Vienna in common. The ranking of the comfort club indices reflects clearly the fact that what is pleasant depends on one’s taste, as evidenced by the differences in the common language trait in the respective top 10 cities identified by the Mercer Index and the EIU-Liveability. Six of the top 10 cities in the Mercer Index (Vienna, Zurich, Munich, Dusseldorf, Frankfurt, and Bern) are German-speaking, and two of them (Copenhagen and Geneva) are right on the border both of the Germanic cultural sphere and the Germanic geographical sphere.

• The balanced club: The GLCI overlaps with the clout club in four cities: Singapore (4), Hong Kong (3), Berlin (2) and Zurich (1). The number in the parenthesis reports the number of times that this GLCI top-10 city appears in the clout club’s top-10 lists. This degree of overlap between GLCI and the clout club indices is substantially higher than the overlap between the clout club indices and the comfort club indices.


The GLCI overlaps with the comfort club in six cities: Auckland (2), Copenhagen (1), Geneva (1), Helsinki (1), Melbourne (1) and Zurich (1). The number in the parenthesis reports the number of times that this GLCI top-10 city appears in the comfort club’s top-10 lists. Once again, the amount of overlap between GLCI and the comfort club indices greatly exceeds the overlap between the clout club and the comfort club.

Since the GLCI fits in both the clout club and the comfort club, we describe it as belonging to the ‘balanced club indices’. The GLCI is, in short, a more balanced indicator than the other six city indices. The GLCI balances the emphasis of the clout club indices on a city’s ability to project influence and to provide economic opportunities against the emphasis of the Comfort Club Indices on a city’s capacity to delight the aesthetic senses and to provide recreational activities. This balancing aspect of GLCI can be seen in that it ranks the top four cities in the Mori, Foreign Policy and Knight Frank indices substantially lower. GLCI ranks New York as 17th, London as 22nd, Paris as 13th, and Tokyo as 18th – and this ranking is, in turn, substantially better than the ranking by the Mori Index, which puts New York as 47th, London as 38th, Paris as 30th, and Tokyo as 46th.

A Freudian analogy could be usefully employed to explore the nature of the GLCI. In a serious sense, the GLCI is the ‘ego’ that combines the ‘super-ego’ of the clout club and the ‘id’ of the comfort club. In Freudian analysis, the super-ego is the critical and moralising function that operates according to the perfection principle; the id is the set of unorganised instincts that operates according to the pleasure principle; and the ego is the organised part of the psyche that operates according to the reality principle. In accordance with the reality principle, the ego is constantly balancing the demand for absolute adherence to the social ideals of the super-ego (being driven by the perfection principle) with the demand for instant gratification of individual desires of the id (being driven by the pleasure principle). The super-ego concept is analogous to the hardnosed emphasis of the clout club on money and influence; the id concept is analogous to the feely-touchy emphasis of the comfort club on pleasant living; and the ego concept is analogous to the ‘middle way’ of the GLCI methodology.

We would like to go further and suggest that we can deduce a particular ethical bias in the GLCI ranking from the degree of attractiveness that the GLCI ranking has for different audiences. Table 11 reports the top-20 city rankings of different types of individuals as measured by the Knight Frank Index and the Mori Index. Part A of Table 11 divides personalities into four types – the ultra-high net worth individual (UHNWI), the entrepreneur, the hedonist, and the romantic – and gives the top 20 city ranking for each personality type. Part B [from Mori Memorial Foundation (2011, Figures 1–4 and Tables 7–8)] partitions personality types into the manager, the researcher, and the artist; and reports the top 20 cities for each group.

Of these seven personality types, we would group the researcher, the manager, the UHNWI, and the entrepreneur types into the super-ego category; and the artist, the hedonist, and the romantic into the id category. When we match the GLCI ranking with the city preference ranking of each personality type in Table 11, we find that the GLCI has 13 matches with the researcher type, 12 matches with the manager type, 11 matches with the UHNWI type, and four with the entrepreneur type; and ten matches with the artist type, seven matches with the Hedonist type, six matches with the Romantic type.


The average number of matches in the super-ego category is 10, and the average number in the id category is almost 8. This finding reveals that the GLCI is closer to the clout club indices than to the comfort club indices, but the bias is not large. For example, the spontaneous artist type still has a 50% match compared with the 65% match of the highly analytical researcher and the 60% of the hardnosed manager type. The GLCI, in short, is most suited for identifying preferred cities for residence by ambitious, task-focused professionals who also value pleasant living; but would not accept the latter in the absence of good career opportunities. In short, the ethical values embodied in the GLCI could be described as the maintenance of a balance between work and play, with work coming before play; and a consistency between responsible global citizenship and active local actions for environmental sustainability.

Table 11 The world’s top 20 cities for different types of people

Part (A) according to the Knight Frank Index

The ultra-high net worth individuals

(UHNWIs) The entrepreneur The Hedonist The Romantic

1 New York Shanghai New York Paris

2 London Hong Kong Hong Kong New York

3 Hong Kong Beijing Tokyo London

4 Singapore New York Paris Rome

5 Beijing Mumbai London Tokyo

6 Shanghai Singapore Shanghai Sydney

7 Tokyo London Rio Shanghai

8 Paris Sao Paulo Barcelona Hong Kong

9 Geneva San Francisco Sydney San Francisco

10 Zurich Palo Alto Dubai Vancouver

11 Washington DC Dubai Bangkok Rio

12 Dubai Rio Beijing Venice

13 Mumbai Moscow Singapore Las Vegas

14 Berlin Sydney Rome Buenos Aires

15 Sydney Delhi Las Vegas Barcelona

16 Moscow Istanbul Monaco Istanbul

17 San Francisco Jakarta Vancouver Beijing

18 Los Angeles Lagos San Francisco Dubai

19 Vancouver Dallas Prague Milan

20 Sao Paulo Bangalore Miami Miami

Source: Reproduced from Frank (2011b, p.62)


Table 11 The world’s top 20 cities for different types of people (continued)

Part (B) according to the Mori Index

The manager The researcher The artist Memo item: GLCI

1 London New York Paris Geneva 2 Singapore Tokyo London Zurich 3 Hong Kong London New York Singapore 4 New York Paris Tokyo Copenhagen 5 Beijing Boston Berlin Helsinki 6 Paris Seoul Vienna Luxembourg 7 Shanghai Singapore Los Angeles Stockholm 8 Tokyo Los Angeles Amsterdam Berlin 9 Zurich San Francisco Madrid Hong Kong 10 Geneva Hong Kong Milan Auckland 11 Amsterdam Sydney San Francisco Melbourne 12 Copenhagen Chicago Beijing Sydney 13 Seoul Berlin Osaka Paris 14 Vancouver Vancouver Chicago Vancouver 15 Vienna Osaka Copenhagen Amsterdam 16 Berlin Amsterdam Brussels Osaka-Kobe 17 Frankfurt Zurich Toronto New York 18 Sydney Geneva Sydney Tokyo 19 Toronto Beijing Vancouver Los Angeles 20 Taipei Vienna Frankfurt Philadelphia

Source: Reproduced from Frank (2011b, p.62)

5 Conclusions

The existing major city indices can be divided into two groups:

1 those that value highly the cities with economic-financial prowess, and strong global agenda-setting power in political and cultural matters

2 those that value highly the cities with pleasant living in mild climate, scenic locations.

The GLCI has been able to combine these two aspects by focusing more on the multi-dimensional needs of the working professionals.

The implicit ethical values of a balance between work and play, and of a balance between thinking globally and acting locally are values which we are comfortable in advocating to any city, and which we think most people could accept. By spelling clearly the construction of GLCI and by selecting a wide range of indicators that are moderately easy to access, we have enabled a city that wishes to promote this kind of lifestyle to achieve it by investing in the areas identified as the low-score components of its GLCI


ranking. Our simulation exercise confirms the feasibility of doing so. In short, our GLCI can be used to enable the fulfilment of the primal human desire for self-improvement.

Our ranking of the liveability of global cities is necessarily a work-in-progress, even if it might arguably be the best-in-its-class because of its balanced approach. There have been some data limitations that we have not yet been able to overcome, and this has forced us to work at this point with a sample of only 64 global cities. In addition to working to expand the number of cities covered, we are also working to improve our methodology by incorporating additional dimensions of liveability into our theoretical framework, and by searching for better proxies for the variables in the empirical framework.

Furthermore, the realities of, one, that the global environmental conditions could change drastically sometimes; and, two, that city administrations and national governments could move comprehensively to a new socio-economic-political policy regime occasionally mean that any ranking of cities on their liveability captures only their relative positions at a particular point in time. For example, the rapid growth of the Chinese economy has generated substantial resources that have allowed many Chinese cities to build 21st Century infrastructure in transportation and to undertake ambitious environmental restoration that would eventually improve the rank of some Chinese cities significantly. But for the moment, these projects have not yet reached critical mass and hence have not improved liveability in these cities substantially enough to boost their ranking. So the rank of a city today is not necessarily a good indicator of its rank in the future. While the GLCI adopts the maximum entropy principle (actually ‘maximum agnosticism principle’) by putting equal weights on every category, obtaining the weights from a survey on people’s preferences would be a more interesting and appropriate exercise for future research.

References A.T. Kearney (2010) The Urban Elite: The A.T. Kearney Global Cities Index 2010 [online]

http://www.atkearney.com/images/global/pdf/Urban_Elite-GCI_2010.pdf (accessed 2012). Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) (2011a) Hot Spots: Benchmarking Global City Competitiveness

[online] http://www.citigroup.com/citi/citiforcities/pdfs/hotspots.pdf (accessed 2012). Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) (2011b) A Summary of the Liveability Ranking and Overview,

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Frank, K. (2011a) The Wealth Report: A Global Perspective on Prime Property and Wealth [online] http://www.knightfrank.com/wealthreport/2011/images/brochure.pdf (accessed 2012).

Frank, K. (2011b) Tales of the Cities: Results of the Knight Frank Global Cities Survey [online] http://www.knightfrank.com/wealthreport/2011/global-cities-survey/ (accessed 2012).

Glaeser, E. (2011) Triumph of the City: How our Greatest Invention Makes US Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier, The Penguin Press.

Ley, A. and Newton, P. (2010) ‘Creating and sustaining liveable cities’, in Kallidaikurichi, S. and Yuen, B. (Eds.): Developing Living Cities: From Analysis to Action, World Scientific, Singapore.

Luque-Martinez, T. and Munoz-Leiva, F. (2005) ‘City benchmarking: a methodological proposal referring specifically to Granada’, Cities, Vol. 22, No. 6, pp.411–423.

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Mercer (2011) The 2011 Quality of Living Worldwide City Rankings – Mercer Survey [online] http://www.mercer.com/qualityoflivingpr#city-rankings (accessed 2012).

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Notes 1 This is why one measure of a country’s efforts to increase sustainability that we use in the

empirical is (G/GDP) rather than the commonly-used G or (G/P). 2 The reader interested in the environmental challenges of China could find a brief review in

Woo (2007). 3 Each of the five main categories comprises of a different number of indicators, subjecting the

weakest 20% indicators to category limitations or setting an equal number of indicators for each category would introduce biasness into the weightings of the simulation.

4 The top 10 cities in GLCI actually turn out to be 11 cities because Auckland and Melbourne compete for the tenth place together.

a new approach to measuring the liveability of cities: the global

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