Where would you rather live: Dublin, New York, London or Paris? Well the city may be currently in the middle of a rental crisis, but a new survey from Mercer has found that Dublin in fact offers a better quality of life than any of the aforementioned top cities of the world.
According to the Mercer 2017 Quality of Living Survey, Dublin is ranked 34th out of 231 global cities, ahead of Paris (38); London (40); Lisbon (43); Edinburgh (45); Madrid (51); Rome (57); and Belfast (66).
The city ranked highly for “an excellent choice of consumer goods, lower levels of air pollution, stable political and strong socio-cultural environment”.
Attractive location
Noel O'Connor, consultant at Mercer Ireland, said, "The 19th Mercer Quality of Living Survey demonstrates that Dublin remains an attractive location for international businesses to send their employees. Dublin is the highest ranked city across the UK and Ireland while also comparing very favourably to a host of other European capital cities."
However, the city has fallen back one place on the 2016 survey (33), and it continues to lag against mid-sized cities across Europe including Vienna, which has held on to the top spot for overall quality of living for the eighth year running. Switzerland and Germany dominate the rest of the top 10, with other top-ranked cities including Zurich (2); Munich (4); Dusseldorf (6); Frankfurt (7) and Geneva (8).
The only non-European cities in the top ten are Auckland (3) and Vancouver (5). The highest-ranking cities in Asia and Latin America are Singapore (25) and Montevideo (79), respectively.
Worst-rating city
The worst-rating city in the survey was Baghdad (231), with Haiti’s Port au Prince (228), Sana’a in the Yemen (229), and Bangui in Central African Republic (230) also ranking poorly.
When it comes to quality of the city’s infrastructure however, something that plays an important role when multinationals decide where to send expatriate workers, Dublin fares far worse – no surprise to its residents perhaps, fed up with roads dug up for Luas works. It ranks 60th, far behind top-placed Singapore; Frankfurt (2nd); London (6th); and Paris (13th).
It means that in the race to secure business post-Brexit should the UK lose its passporting right for financial services, companies could look less favourably on Dublin.
