At least downtown Yangon looks pretty awesome at night. PHOTO/ WIKICOMMONS
Put it down to the traffic. Or the power outages. Or maybe the unyielding rainy season.
The folks at Mercer, a global human resources consulting firm, have placed Yangon in the lower tier of their 2015 quality of living rankings.
Myanmar’s commercial capital came in at 201 in the survey of 230 countries intended to help companies place employees abroad and determine hardship allowances.
Factors taken into consideration included politics, economics, environment, health, personal safety and transport.
We were ranked just above Karachi and below Luanda, Angola.
Vienna, Austria topped the survey – for the fifth year running since the survey began in 2010 – while last place was claimed by Baghdad.
But among the places deemed better-suited for living than Yangon are Tegucigalpa, Honduras – which has one of the highest murder rates in the world – and Cairo – where bombs explode regularly and 230 secular activists were recently imprisoned for life en masse.
In the region, only Dhaka, Bangladesh fared worse while Singapore came first in 26th place.
Seriously, Mercer, it’s not all bad. Ever heard of Shwedagon? Tea leaf salad?
The top five countries were:
1. Vienna, Austria
2. Zurich, Switzerland
3. Auckland, New Zealand
4. Munich, Germany
5. Vancouver, Canada
And the bottom:
226. N’Djamena, Chad
227. Khartoum, Sudan
228. Port au Prince, Haiti
229. Bangui, Central African Republic
230. Baghdad, Iraq
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