As 2012 ticks towards its close and the celebrations beckon, where are the best places to begin the New Year? Well, according to a recent report, the city with the best quality of life in the world is Vienna.
London is the highest ranked UK city but only makes 38th place internationally. In bottom place, and consequently a destination to avoid in 2013, is Port-au-Prince in Haiti which has still not fully recovered from the devastating earthquake that occurred two years ago. Having only a marginally better quality of life is the troubled Iraqi capital Baghdad.
The rankings come from consultancy firm Mercer’s Quality of Living Survey which takes a number of factors into consideration. Among these is the infrastructure index, an area where London, with its excellent transport links, scored highly. Other factors include the standard of living and the level of political and economic stability.
Despite the Eurozone crisis, Europe has 15 cities in the top 25. The quality of life in these cities makes them great places to live and work and, consequently, appealing locations for commercial property investment.
For example Frankfurt, which ranks seventh globally, is one of the world’s leading banking and financial centres. During 2012 office properties remained in strong demand, accounting for around 50 per cent of all transactions.
Another German city in the top ten is Munich. Here annual office take-up rose to 700,000 square metres during 2012 and there was a marked increase in investment momentum during the second half of the year.
At the opposite end of the scale, the Middle East and Africa have 15 cities in the bottom 20 including Lagos in Nigeria, Bamako in Mali and N’Djamena in Chad.
In the United States, Honolulu has the highest quality of life followed by San Francisco and Boston. A number of South and Central American countries have also seen their rankings rise reflecting improvements in their economic performance.
After London the highest ranking UK cities in which to begin the New Year are Birmingham, Glasgow and Aberdeen.
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