Who says Auckland is 'the eighth most liveable city in the world'?

Monday, 12 March 2018

Auckland was ranked eighth most 'liveable' city in 2017.

Stuff is taking a closer look at popular claims or statistics, to see whether they stack up and to dive deeper into the numbers. In this, the second instalment of the series Stats Check, Andy Fyers takes a look at the claim 'Auckland is the eighth most liveable city in world.'

To most New Zealanders, Auckland has become synonymous with traffic gridlock and unaffordable housing.

Despite these problems, the city's international reputation has been enhanced in recent years. Particularly by the Global Liveability Report, which ranked Auckland the eighth most liveable city in the world in 2016 and 2017.

The ranking was a source of great pride for then-Auckland Mayor Len Brown in 2016, whose goal was to make the Auckland the most liveable city in the world.

* Most liveable cities not the most loved

* Stats check: Is migration breaking the man drought?**

We decided to take a closer look at the rankings and what they can and cannot tell us about liveability in our biggest city.

WHERE DO THE RANKINGS COME FROM?

Before we get into the nitty gritty of how the rankings are determined, it's worth looking at who puts them together and their reasons for doing so.

The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), the research and analysis unit of the Economist Group, and a sister company to the Economist magazine, produces the rankings.

In their words, the EIU help 'businesses, financial firms and governments to understand how the world is changing and how that creates opportunities to be seized and risks to be managed.'

EIU's Head of City Practices, Roxana Slavcheva said the liveability rankings 'have an international focus in terms of comparing cities around the world'.

But crucially, do not '… seek to rank which city is the 'best' to live in but to quantify where there are fewer challenges to day to day life,' she said.

One of the key uses of the survey is to enable multinational companies to determine whether employees should receive special remuneration for living in a city in which day-to-day life is 'restricted' in some way. In fact, the EIU go as far as to suggest an allowance based on a city's liveability rating.

HOW DO THEY COME UP WITH THE RANKINGS?

Each city is given a rating across five main categories and each carries a weighting towards the final overall score out of 100.

A city that scores between 80 and 100 is said to have '… few, if any, challenges to living standards', while in one that scores less than 50 'most aspects of life are severely restricted'.

The categories (with weightings in brackets) are: stability (25 per cent), healthcare (20), education (10), infrastructure (20) and culture and environment (25).

Within the five categories there are 30 sub categories which make use of a total of 44 indicators.

Each indicator is rated as acceptable, tolerable, uncomfortable, undesirable or intolerable. Some indicators are determined by quantitative factors, such as the humidity/temperature rating - which is determined using weather data - and the health and education indicators which are adapted from World Bank data.

But the majority are qualitative (ie not founded on hard data) and are 'based on the judgment of in-house analysts and in-city contributors'. The EIU calls these qualitatives scores, 'EIU ratings'.

Sub-categories rated qualitatively include: threat of terror, quality and availability of healthcare, quality of public transport and the level of censorship.

With so much of a city's overall rating determined qualitatively we wanted to know how the EIU ensured consistency of rating between cities.

Slavcheva told Stuff the scale is 'uniform and standard and is used by our correspondents and analysts across all cities. We have guidance on what is meant by each of these five points [acceptable, tolerable, uncomfortable, undesirable and intolerable] so that the assigned score by correspondents, which is then verified and checked by analysts with expertise in the region, falls within the appropriate scale.'

You can see each of the sub-categories below, the main category they belong to, the contribution to overall weighting and how they are determined.

WHAT THE RANKING CAN'T TELL US

The ranking takes no account of things like the cost of living, incomes, inequality or housing affordability (although it does rate 'availability of good quality housing'), all factors that would contribute to a city's liveability for the average resident.

This does not mean the rankings are wrong or invalid because they exclude these things, but it does mean they should only be interpreted in the context of the factors which are included.

As mentioned , even the EIU say that they 'do not seek to rank which city is the 'best' to live in but to quantify where there are fewer challenges to day to day life'.

Cities are also large and complex and quality of life - and what determines it - will vary dramatically for different people within the same city.

Finally only 140 cities are ranked and only two from New Zealand feature - Wellington is the other.

Even if you were to take Auckland's eighth place at face value, it still might not even be the most liveable city in New Zealand.

* Is there a popular claim or statistic you'd like us to take a closer look at? Leave a suggestion in the comments or email us at newstips@stuff.co.nz

Stuff is producing this series with Figure NZ.