Taipei this year fell from 33rd to 53rd in the “world’s most livable cities” ranking, an annual report published on Wednesday by The Economist said.
With the tagline “Life is getting back to normal, if not quite everywhere,” the report included 33 more cities in its annual “most livable cities” list this year for a total of 172 locations.
The Economist also included Taichung in the rankings, with a score of 80 to 90, similar to that of Taipei, but without indicating the city’s ranking.
Photo: Bloomberg
The Economist Intelligence Unit said that the Vienna replaced Auckland as the world’s most livable city, giving it back the title it held in 2018 and 2019.
In naming Vienna as an appealing city to live in, the unit and its survey noted the availability of entertainment venues as the local COVID-19 situation eases, well-rounded and stable infrastructure, and commendable healthcare.
The unit attributed Auckland’s drop to 34th this year to New Zealand’s COVID-19 response measures and the effects of the pandemic there.
Europe took six of the top 10 spots, with Copenhagen placing second in the rankings, followed by Zurich in third and Geneva, Switzerland, in sixth.
Frankfurt, Germany, took the seventh spot, while Amsterdam was ninth.
In North America, Calgary, Canada, shared the third spot with Zurich, while Vancouver took fifth and Toronto the eighth spot.
Osaka, Japan, and Melbourne shared the 10th spot.
CHIP RACE: Three years of overbroad export controls drove foreign competitors to pursue their own AI chips, and ‘cost US taxpayers billions of dollars,’ Nvidia said China has figured out the US strategy for allowing it to buy Nvidia Corp’s H200s and is rejecting the artificial intelligence (AI) chip in favor of domestically developed semiconductors, White House AI adviser David Sacks said, citing news reports. US President Donald Trump on Monday said that he would allow shipments of Nvidia’s H200 chips to China, part of an administration effort backed by Sacks to challenge Chinese tech champions such as Huawei Technologies Co (華為) by bringing US competition to their home market. On Friday, Sacks signaled that he was uncertain about whether that approach would work. “They’re rejecting our chips,” Sacks
It is challenging to build infrastructure in much of Europe. Constrained budgets and polarized politics tend to undermine long-term projects, forcing officials to react to emergencies rather than plan for the future. Not in Austria. Today, the country is to officially open its Koralmbahn tunnel, the 5.9 billion euro (US$6.9 billion) centerpiece of a groundbreaking new railway that will eventually run from Poland’s Baltic coast to the Adriatic Sea, transforming travel within Austria and positioning the Alpine nation at the forefront of logistics in Europe. “It is Austria’s biggest socio-economic experiment in over a century,” said Eric Kirschner, an economist at Graz-based Joanneum
BUBBLE? Only a handful of companies are seeing rapid revenue growth and higher valuations, and it is not enough to call the AI trend a transformation, an analyst said Artificial intelligence (AI) is entering a more challenging phase next year as companies move beyond experimentation and begin demanding clear financial returns from a technology that has delivered big gains to only a small group of early adopters, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) Taiwan said yesterday. Most organizations have been able to justify AI investments through cost recovery or modest efficiency gains, but few have achieved meaningful revenue growth or long-term competitive advantage, the consultancy said in its 2026 AI Business Predictions report. This growing performance gap is forcing executives to reconsider how AI is deployed across their organizations, it said. “Many companies
Taiwan’s long-term economic competitiveness will hinge not only on national champions like Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC, 台積電) but also on the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) and other emerging technologies, a US-based scholar has said. At a lecture in Taipei on Tuesday, Jeffrey Ding, assistant professor of political science at the George Washington University and author of "Technology and the Rise of Great Powers," argued that historical experience shows that general-purpose technologies (GPTs) — such as electricity, computers and now AI — shape long-term economic advantages through their diffusion across the broader economy. "What really matters is not who pioneers
RSS