KUALA LUMPUR (June 28): Kuala Lumpur jumped 19 positions to rank 94th on the Economist Intelligence Unit’s (EIU) Global Liveability Index 2023.

In a report last week, EIU said living conditions in cities across the world have fully recovered from the deterioration caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.

It rates living conditions in 173 cities across five categories: stability, health care, culture and environment, education and infrastructure.

Cities in the Asia-Pacific region have rebounded the most.

The index also suggests that life in cities is a bit better than at any time in the past 15 years.

EIU said the liveability survey was designed to help companies calculate hardship allowances for staff who were moving to a new and possibly less tolerable city.

As a by-product, it also provides a snapshot of the most, and least, desirable cities to live in if you’re an expat.

Vienna, with its excellent mix of stability, culture and entertainment, and reliable infrastructure, topped the ranking for the fourth time in five years.

Copenhagen, a similarly sized city with many of the same characteristics, came in second.

Melbourne, a fixture at the top of the ranking in the past, came in third.

In all, nine of the top ten cities are small to mid-sized; all ten, and indeed most of the top 50, are in rich countries.

Big cities with high levels of crime, congestion and density tend to fare less well. London — down 12 places from a year ago — came in 46th and New York was down ten spots to 69th.

Wellington climbed 35 places while Auckland was up 25 compared with a year ago; Hanoi was up 20 and Kuala Lumpur jumped 19 positions.

EIU said post-pandemic improvements in education and health-care scores across Asia, Africa and the Middle East were the main reasons for this year’s rise in living standards.

At the bottom of the table, Damascus has been the least liveable city in the index for more than a decade.

Tripoli is one space above, although its score is nearly ten points higher than that of Syria’s war-ravaged capital.

Kyiv, despite its efforts to protect itself from the war, also features in the bottom ten.

It was excluded from the index in 2022 because Russia invaded Ukraine while the data was being collected.

Its infrastructure score of 23.2 out of 100 is the lowest in the index, thanks to Russian bombs.