Dubai has been ranked as the best city to live in 2020 in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, as per a recent report published by Global Finance. Significantly, the report states that culture, liveability factor and rate of accessibility have enabled Dubai to achieve the leading position in the list of the best city to live in 2020 for MENA region.

In its report, Global Finance has ranked 48 countries across the world on the basis of a score reflecting an extensive list of eight unique factors including livability; economic strength; research and development; accessibility; cultural interaction; environment; GDP per capita (nominal in USD); and COVID-19 deaths per million for the country.

According to the report, each of these factors consists of a significant way of understanding the quality of life while living in these cities, adding that each of the metrics was standardised in order to accurately quantify them into a single overall score. Furthermore, the report has taken into account the COVID-19 deaths metric by a factor of three with the aim to highlight the impact of a pandemic like COVID-19 in the day-to-day lifestyle in a city to analyse which cities would be the best to live in.

In the aftermath of global Coronavirus pandemic, European countries, which usually have higher performance ranking, have shrunk down to the bottom of the list, including Brussels, Milan and Barcelona. This development has emerged as a sharp contrast against some of the East Asian cities as they have unprecedently climbed up the ranking order. Cities like Kuala Lumpur (23) and Bangkok (32) have ranked above major US cities such as Los Angeles (33), Boston (36) and Washington DC (39) due to their low COVID-19 death rates as compared to higher COVID-19 death rates in America.

While some changes were observed in the rankings, many of the top 10 cities retained their position this year with new entry of Dubai (6), Bangkok (8), and Moscow (10) in the cultural interaction indicator. Reportedly, both Dubai and Bangkok received high scores in terms of the number of foreign visitors and number of luxury hotel rooms, in addition to receiving high evaluations in terms of the number of foreign residents and number of hotel rooms, respectively.

In terms of economy, Dubai achieved the 19th spot while it ranked 9th in the newly-added indicator of Nightlife Options, beating Chicago, Singapore and Tokyo. At the same time, the city earned the 9th and 28th spot in terms of accessibility and liveability respectively.

"Within the newly added cities this year, Dublin (11) in particular achieves excellent results. Among European cities, it obtains the highest scores after London (2) and Zurich (5), with Corporate Tax Rate scoring just behind Dubai, while also earning the only European top-10 position in GDP Growth Rate,” the report added.

Furthermore, Frankfurt (5) and Dubai (9) have improved their ranks with advancements in their Commuting Time and Traffic Congestion areas while large cities have shown weak results. This year, ranking of Tokyo (8) also dropped due to lack of improvement in the area of Direct International Flights and Travel Time to Airports while Amsterdam and Hong Kong received higher scores in this category.

Here are the top 20 cities to live in in 2020 as per the Global Finance report:

1.     Tokyo, Japan

2.     London, UK

3.     Singapore, Republic of Singapore

4.     New York, US

5.     Melbourne, Australia

6.     Frankfurt, Germany

7.     Paris, France

8.     Seoul, South Korea

9.     Berlin, Germany

10. Sydney, Australia

11. Hong Kong, China

12. Copenhagen, Denmark

13. Vienna, Austria

14. Amsterdam, Netherlands

15. Helsinki, Finland

16. Zurich, Switzerland

17. Dubai, UAE

18. Osaka, Japan

19. Toronto, Canada

20. Geneva, Switzerland