Canberra best place in the world to live: OECD

PanARMENIAN.Net - The Australian Capital Territory of Canberra in Australia is the best place in the world to live, says a report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

Canberra led the regional ranking while Australia topped the overall country rankings, followed by Norway, according to BBC News.

The OECD ranked 362 regions of its 34 member nations in its survey. It used nine measures of wellbeing, including income, education, jobs, safety, health and environment.

Five Australian cities including Sydney, Melbourne and Perth were also in the top 10. Other top-scoring places included the states of New Hampshire and Minnesota in the U.S.

On the other end of the scale, Mexican states constituted all 10 of the bottom regional rankings. On a country level, Mexico, Turkey, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia were ranked as the hardest places to live.

The OECD study, while not comprehensive, is one of the few to analyze the quality of life in countries.

"Recent years have seen an increasing awareness that macro economic statistics, such as GDP do not provide policy-makers with a sufficiently detailed picture of the living conditions that ordinary people experience," the OECD said on its website.

"Developing statistics that can better reflect the wide range of factors that matter to people and their well-being (the so called "household perspective") is of crucial importance for the credibility and accountability of public policies and for the very functioning of democracy."