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Auckland has become the world’s most liveable city

The success of New Zealand and Japan in controlling covid-19 has sent their cities soaring up the rankings

NEW ZEALAND has done a remarkable job of controlling covid-19. It has reported just 26 deaths from the disease, roughly one out of every 200,000 people. On many days this year, it has not recorded a single new case. One of those days was March 19th—a time when many countries were still enforcing strict lockdowns, but Auckland was already permitting concerts. As 12,000 fans of Crowded House, an Australian rock band, squeezed into Spark Arena that night, they had good reason to think they were living in the best city in the world.

A new survey of “liveability” in 140 cities by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), a sister company of The Economist, gives mathematical weight to such a claim. For the first time, Auckland leads the EIU’s ranking, thanks largely to the city’s early containment of the pandemic and to its subsequent ability to lift restrictions on mobility. It came 12th in 2019, the most recent year in which the EIU published its list. Close on Auckland’s heels is Wellington, New Zealand’s capital, which moved up from 25th in 2019 to fourth this year. Other island nations with strong border controls also fared well: two Japanese cities and four from Australia appear in the top ten. In the vast majority of cities, however, living conditions have plummeted compared with pre-pandemic levels.

Originally designed as a tool to help companies assign hardship allowances as part of expatriate relocation packages, the EIU’s index rates living conditions in 140 cities based on more than 30 factors, which are grouped into five categories: stability, health care, culture and environment, education and infrastructure. This year it also incorporates new indicators related to covid-19, which assess how each city has coped with increased demand on health-care facilities and with closures or capacity limits for schools, restaurants and cultural venues. (Because there were few differences between cities in these categories before the pandemic, the new numbers can still be compared fairly with 2019’s.) The looser a city’s lockdown rules, the better it scores in the categories related to openness. However, if such laissez-faire policies allow covid-19 to run rampant, the worse such a city will do in the “stress on health-care resources” measure. The best performers thus combine generous freedoms with few severe cases of covid-19.

The net effect of these additions was to send most cities in Europe plunging down the rankings. Prague’s score fell the most, by 13.5 points out of 100, followed by London and Frankfurt with 13.2. And Vienna, which came first in 2019, fell to 12th this year. Most of these cities scored poorly on the availability of health-care resources during the second wave of the pandemic. In contrast, some American cities gained ground because they have coped with the pandemic better than other places. Houston climbed 24 places, to 31st overall, thanks to the combination of a relaxation of lockdown restrictions and its lowest numbers of covid-19 patients since November. Honolulu, which benefits both from its island location and from Hawaii’s successful vaccine rollout, was the highest-placed American city at 14th.

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