Singapore tops the index of cities with the best infrastructure across the world. As per Mercer’s City Infrastructure Ranking 2012, Singapore was ranked first amongst 221 cities with the best basic urban infrastructure in the world. Singapore beat cities such as Frankfurt and Munich (Germany), Copenhagen (Denmark), Hong Kong, London (UK) and Sydney (Australia) to reach the top position. The stability and efficiency of Singapore’s urban infrastructure propelled the city-state to the top of the list. Further, Singapore was the only city in the Southeast Asian region and in the Asian region to have figured amongst the top 50 cities and top 10 cities with best basic infrastructure respectively.
The City Infrastructure Ranking 2012 was released as a part of Mercer’s annual Quality of Living Survey. This is the first time that Mercer has separately identified the cities with the best infrastructure based on electricity supply, water availability, telephone and mail services, public transportation, traffic congestion, and the range of international flights from local airports.
Earlier, in December 2012, Singapore was ranked first in the Infrastructure Investment Index released by EC Harris, a London-headquartered asset consultancy. The company ranked 40 countries across the globe on the basis of their ability to attract infrastructure funds. In order to gauge a country’s appeal, the study took into consideration several factors such as the ease of doing business in each market, tax rates, GDP per capita, government policy, the quality of the existing infrastructure, and the availability of debt finance. Singapore scored consistently high on all these criteria. Further, the World Bank has also named Singapore as the easiest place in the world to do business.
