Hanoi, HCMC are better places to live in

In the Economist Intelligence Unit's ranking of the world's most liveable cities, Hanoi and HCMC are two of the five biggest improvers in the last five years along with Abidjan in Cote d’Ivoire, Belgrade in Serbia, and Tehran in Iran.

Out of the 140 cities surveyed, Hanoi ranks 107 with an overall rating of 59.7 out of 100, marking a five-year rise of 5.5 percentage points.

HCMC is at 116 with 57.1 points, rising 4.4 percentage points.

This year, Melbourne in Australia gave up the throne after reigning for seven years in a row. Vienna has the top spot now, marking the very first time the Austrian capital has ever made it that far.

Although both Melbourne and Vienna have registered improvements in liveability over the last six months, increases in Vienna’s ratings, particularly in the stability category, gave it the edge.

The two cities are now separated by 0.7 of a percentage point, with Vienna scoring a near-ideal 99.1 out of 100 and Melbourne scoring 98.4.

Other cities that have made it to the top ten this year include Osaka in Japan, Canada’s Calgary, Australia’s Sydney, Canada’s Vancouver, Canada’s Toronto, Japan’s Tokyo, Denmark’s Copenhagen, and Australia’s Adelaide.

To come up with the rating, Economist evaluated the cities in over 30 qualitative and quantitative factors across five broad categories: stability, healthcare, culture and environment, education, and infrastructure. Each factor in a city was rated as acceptable, tolerable, uncomfortable, undesirable or intolerable.

In January, Hanoi and HCMC were said to be among the top 10 cheapest cities in Southeast Asia this year. The capital city and the nation’s commercial hub took the 7th and 9th place respectively (out of 27) in the Cost of Living Index 2018 compiled by Numbeo, the world’s largest database of user contributed data about cities and countries worldwide.