Taipei has been named the best city to live and work in the world as an expat for the second year running.
The capital of Taiwan topped InterNations annual Expat City Rankings, which surveyed more than 20,000 expats, representing 178 nationalities and living in 187 countries or territories on more than 25 different aspects of urban life abroad.
The report found that expats who live in Taipei are particularly happy with the city’s high quality of life, ranking the city third worldwide, preceded only by Tokyo, Japan and Zug, Switzerland. Almost all expats (98 per cent) are satisfied with the local transportation (compared to 70 per cent globally), and a vast majority (94 per cent) is happy with the availability of healthcare in the city (against 73 per cent globally).
Asian cities fared particularly well in the survey with Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia ranked second, Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh City in third and Singapore in fourth.
Montreal, Canada was the highest-ranked non-Asian city in fifth, while Lisbon in Portugal was the best performing European city.
Barcelona in Spain, Zug, The Hague in the Netherlands, and Basel in Switzerland rounded out the top ten.
At the other end of the scale, Kuwait City was ranked the worst city for expats to live in, placing 82nd out of 82 cities in the Expat City Ranking 2019.
Kuwait City’s worst performing area is the Getting Settled Index, for which it comes last in all subcategories, aside from the Local Language subcategory. Almost three in five respondents (57 per cent) feel that the local residents are unfriendly towards foreigners (vs. 19 per cent globally), 62 per cent struggle to find new friends (vs. 35 per cent globally), and 57 per cent are unhappy with their social life (vs. 27 per cent globally).
Perhaps surprisingly, some major European capital cities also placed in the lower echelons of the list. Rome, Italy ranked 81st, while Paris, France was 78th. Another Italian city, Milan, was 80th, while the Californian cities of San Francisco and Los Angeles were 77th and 76th respectively.
Lago, Nigeria was in 79th place.
Article published 4th December 2019