Baghdad named city with worlds worst quality of living

Mercer’s Quality of Living ranking covers 215 cities and is conducted to help governments and major companies place employees on international assignments.
According to Slagin Parakatil, Senior Researcher at Mercer, "many companies plan to reduce the number of medium to long-term international assignments and localise their expatriate compensation packages where possible though the hardship allowance, based on quality of living criteria, will remain an essential component of the package.”
Research for Mercer’s reports is carried out by means of a detailed questionnaire with pre-defined criteria and a specific scoring system. Researchers and consultants in Mercer offices worldwide analyse the data which is then cross-checked against various sources by Mercer s experts.
Key features and benefits of Mercer’s reports
• Tangible values for qualitative perceptions to establish an objective assessment of the quality of living for transfers to more than 420 cities worldwide.
• Carefully selected factors representing the criteria considered most relevant to international executives.
• A detailed outline of how we establish quality of living differentials between cities.
• A City-to-City Index Comparison that summarises the difference in the quality-of-living between any two cities.
• The final quality of living index and access to the detailed breakdown of the categories that form the resulting index.
• An online quality of living calculator allowing you to customise the QOL index to your specific needs.
Mercer’s recommended Quality of Living Allowance Grid that allows you to translate the quality of living index into percentage benefits and define competitive hardship allowances where applicable.
Vienna has beaten Zurich to be crowned the place with the best quality of living in an annual survey in which European cities dominated the top 10.
Management consultancy Mercer said Vienna scored the highest for overall quality of living in the 215-city survey after improvements in Austria s political and social environment, knocking the Swiss city of Zurich into second position.
Third in the list came another Swiss city, Geneva, followed by Vancouver, Canada, and Auckland, New Zealand, in shared fourth place.
Baghdad, Iraq, came last despite slight improvements in its infrastructure and moves to encourage investment. Though its index score has increased (from 13.5 to 14.4 in 2009) due to some slight improvements in its infrastructure and steps taken to encourage investment., nevertheless, the lack of security and stability continue to have a large impact on quality of living and the city’s score remains far behind Bangui (29.3) in the Central African Republic, which is second to last.
This year’s ranking also identifies the cities with the best infrastructure based on electricity supply, water availability, telephone and mail services, public transport provision, traffic congestion and the range of international flights from local airports. On this ranking, Baghdad ranks at the bottom of the table with a score of only 19

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