Manila fails to improve in liveability index

Poor infrastructure, healthcare and education systems continued to stunt the growth of Manila in terms of providing decent living for its inhabitants, the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) said.

The capital of the Philippines remained in the 104th spot based on the EIU’s 2016 Global Liveability Survey, which ranks 140 cities around the world. The EIU, which assesses the cities yearly, is the research arm of the London-based media company The Economist Group.

In an e-mail to the Inquirer, EIU lead analyst for the Asean region Miguel Chanco said Manila also ranked fifth in Southeast Asia behind Singapore, Malaysia’s Kuala Lumpur, Brunei’s Bandar Seri Begawan and Thailand’s Bangkok.

“Within Asean, Manila fares poorly in terms of healthcare, education and infrastructure. More specifically, the city lags behind in terms of the quality and the availability of public healthcare and education. Furthermore, Manila’s road network leaves much to be desired and its public transport system remains woefully inadequate,” Chanco said.

He said, however, Manila does well in some aspects of the EIU study, including the city’s restaurant scene and the ease of availability of consumer goods and services—both of which are part of the culture and environment category.

Each city is assigned a rating of relative comfort for over 30 qualitative and quantitative factors across five broad categories: Stability, healthcare, culture and environment, education, and infrastructure. The different factors are rated acceptable, tolerable, uncomfortable, undesirable or intolerable.

To further boost the country’s rankings, Chanco cited the need for the Philippine government to invest heavily in areas that needed improving.

“The short answer is greater public investment in a multitude of areas: The provision of public healthcare and education and improvements to the city’s transport infrastructure. These are likely to take time, however, so it would be unrealistic to expect change overnight and for Manila’s ranking to rise by much come 2017,” Chanco said.

Globally, Melbourne in Australia remained the most liveable of the 140 cities surveyed, followed closely by the Austrian capital, Vienna, and Canada’s Vancouver and Toronto. Another Canadian city, Calgary, shared fifth place with Adelaide in Australia.

“Although the top five cities remain unchanged, the past year has seen increasing instability across the world, causing volatility in the scores of many cities. Sydney, for example, has fallen by four places, to move out of the ten most liveable cities, owing to a heightened perceived threat of terrorism,” the report stated.

“The continuing weakening of global stability scores has been made uncomfortably apparent by a number of high-profile incidents that have not shown any signs of slowing in recent years. Violent acts of terrorism have been reported in many countries, including Turkey, Australia, Bangladesh, Pakistan, France, Belgium and the US. This has been a year undoubtedly marked by terrorism,” it added.