Top 10 Best, Safest Cities Revealed in New Global Survey

By R. Siva Kumar - 31 Jan '15 13:13PM

And the best city in the world to live in is...Toronto!

The Economist has put up the ranking of cities, which assesses their performance across a range of indices, including "safety, livability and cost of living". The parameters also included national level factors such as Democracy and Global Food Security Index.

In a new survey by the Economist Intelligence Unit that is looking at how safe cities are, Toronto is the safest city in North America and ranked eighth safest in the world, behind Tokyo, Singapore, Osaka, Stockholm, Amsterdam, Sydney, and Zurich. The safety index follows criteria such as "digital security, health security, infrastructure and personal safety", according to blogto.com.

Toronto was the in the top of the list, according to five earlier Economist factors: Livability, cost of living, business environment, democracy and food security. "Toronto in Canada is a consistent performer across the five other indexes, putting it top overall," read the report, according to nationalpost.com. Though it did not rank first in a single index, it stayed on in the top 10.

In the overall rankings, or, as the Economist calls the "index of indexes", there is just one section in which Toronto does not feature in the list of the top 10. That is the cost of living, in which this city features as the 70^th city, behind even Tehran, Rio de Janeiro, Abu Dhabi and even San Francisco. Most of the other cities in the top 10 of the cities are seen to be more expensive.

The cities in the top 10 list included two Canadian cities---Toronto and Montreal. Australia had two cities, with Melbourne and Sydney, the United States ranked three--Washington, San Francisco and Chicago and the rest of the countries in the list were European cities---Amsterdam, Stockholm, Zurich.

These are the lists of the cities:

The top 10 global cities: