Euromoney’s inaugural Global cities survey combined executive opinion (qualitative ratings) with hard data (quantitative data) from various sources in the market, across a variety of categories, to produce an authoritative ranking of the best cities in the world.
Qualitative data – senior executives at multinational corporates and financial institutions were asked to rate their selected cities for which they have knowledge from 1 to 7 (1 = very poor and 7 = excellent) across the following categories: financial competitiveness; hard infrastructure; tax; technology and innovation; healthcare; education; and environmental sustainability.
Within these categories, there were 16 sub-indicators to be rated:
Financial competitiveness
Quality and efficiency of the regulatory framework
Breadth and diversity of financial services in city
Connectivity of the city
Hard infrastructure
The quality of the roads
Law, order and security
Quality of long-distance travel
Quality of mass-transit transport
Tax
Forward visibility of tax liabilities
Efficiency of the tax system
Technology and innovation
Quality of technological infrastructure
Availability of co-funding
Healthcare
Sickness and absenteeism
Healthcare accessibility
Education
The availability of qualified employees in the city
Environmental sustainability
Air quality
Promotion of green policies and initiatives
Quantitative data
Hard data was collected through a variety of sources, including government, city/council, federal, national and international websites, with reference to the following categories and sub-categories:
Education
Number of graduates per 100,000 population by country
Number of Masters, PhDs, and MBAs per 100,000 population (by country)
Financial competitiveness
City GDP (%PPP)
Domestic credit provided by banking sector as percentage of GDP by country
Number of corporate HQs by city (2010)
Hard infrastructure
Population ,000 (2010)
City length of mass transit (km) (2010)
Healthcare
Number of in-patient hospital beds (per 100,000 population) by country
Number of physicians (per 100,000 population) by country
Environmental sustainability
CO2 emissions per capita metric tons by country
Energy use (total million metric tons of oil equivalent) by country
Tax
Number of payments, June 2010, by country
Time to prepare, file and pay taxes, hours, June 2010, by country
Technology and innovation
Number of new patents granted per country (1995-2009)
Fixed broadband subscriptions per 100 inhabitants by country (2009)
Number of science/engineering graduates per country (total)
The hard data and soft data were then weighted evenly and added together to produce the final scores out of 100.
We received 419 qualified responses in this inaugural year.