Global Cities Index: Delhi ranks best in India; Kochi, Thrissur better in ‘quality of life’
Global Cities Index: Delhi ranks best in India; Kochi, Thrissur better in ‘quality of life’
Oxford Economics on Tuesday (May 21) cam out with its inaugural Global Cities Index, a ‘comprehensive evaluation’ of the world’s 1,000 major cities, spanning 163 different countries.
Performance of cities across India
Delhi is ranked the best among Indian cities in the Oxford Economics Global Cities Index. The national capital, however, ranks 350th on the global list.
According to the economic forecaster’s report, Delhi fared better than Mumbai on several parameters, including economics, human capital, and quality of life.
However, considering factors such as livability and attractiveness of a city, which can act as a fulcrum in migration patterns, Kochi and Thrissur have outperformed major Indian cities like Mumbai, Delhi and Bengaluru.
Major Indian cities performed particularly poorly when ranked on the basis of quality of life. Mumbai, the financial capital of India, ranked 915, while the national capital, Delhi, secured the 838th position.
Bengaluru, known as the IT hub, was rated at 847, while Hyderabad was placed lower at 882.
Under the ‘quality of life’ parameter, the benefits of living in each city and residents’ well-being, financial and health outcomes, as well as access to amenities are measured.
Meanwhile, cities like Kochi and Thrissur have fared better than the major cities of India in this bracket. Kochi stood at 765 in the ranking while Thrissur in Kerala was at 757.
Delhi was worse in the environment ranking, at 973, while Uttar Pradesh’s Sultanpur performed the worst, and was ranked 989 in this category. All the Indian cities ranked 380 in governance.
However, the Indian city of Sultanpur ranked the lowest in the world, at the 1,000th spot.
Performance of cities across the world
The Oxford Index has ranked New York at the top of the list, followed by London, San Jose, Tokyo and Japan. The first 50 places of the index were dominated by cities in the US and Europe.
Across the 1,000 cities, those in North America, Western Europe and Oceania generally performed best, scoring highly across all brackets.
Australian cities also fared remarkably, with Melbourne in ninth place, Sydney in the 16th spot and Perth in 23rd.
"Our Global Cities Index provides a consistent framework for assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the largest 1,000 cities across the world, and when coupled with our forecasts, it enables organisations and policymakers to make more informed strategic decisions," said Mark Britton, director of city services at Oxford Economics, based in Oxford, England.
New York City "has the largest economy of any city in the world by far," Oxford Economics said, along with having stable growth, allowing it to dominate the economics category.
London took first place in the human capital category because of its wealth of top universities and global corporate headquarters, as per the report.
Meanwhile, Grenoble, France, offers the best quality of life due to income equality and the number of cultural offerings per capita.
Forecast for the coming years
Looking ahead to the coming years, the index claims that there are several global trends that have the potential to disrupt these rankings.
As per the report, facets such as uneven economic outlook across regions and lingering inflationary concerns could negatively impact the economics score of many locations.
Along similar lines, debt sustainability continues to be far-fetched for many developing countries following the COVID-19 pandemic, while a period of heightened interest rates further threatens the economies of cities.
How are the scores calculated?
The Oxford Economics Global Cities Index provides a holistic assessment of the largest cities in the world and a direct comparison among them on a range of metrics.
The economic forecaster crunched the numbers for 27 indicators across five categories to draw out the rankings.
The five broad categories are economics, human capital, quality of life, environment, and governance.
The report evaluates cities across given categories with differing weightage. The overall city ranking is determined by economics (30%), human capital (25%), quality of life (25%), environment (10%), and governance (10%).
"After we collected data for each indicator for all cities, we created a normalised score for each indicator by assigning the highest-scoring city a score of 100 for that indicator, the lowest-scoring city a score of 0, and distributing the rest of the cities’ scores across that range. We combined the scores for each indicator within a category to create a total score for that category for each city. We then normalised the total score for each category, and calculated the city’s final overall score by taking a weighted average of each category’s normalised score," said the report.