Location rankings

Continuous monitoring of the most important location rankings enables the External Affairs and Marketing division to closely monitor the reputation and location factors of the city and the Basel region in international comparison. Basel’s positionings in the current location rankings include, among others, the following:

  • For the third year in succession Basel took the number 10 position in Mercer’s 2019 Quality of Living City Ranking which rates the best places to live among the world’s cities. Thus in terms of quality of life, Basel is rated ahead of Amsterdam (11), Berlin (13), Bern (15), Paris (39), Milan (41) or London (also 41). Zurich even took the number two spot in the global ranking and Geneva came in at number nine.
  • According to the foreign direct investment index (FDI), in 2022 Basel occupied the top position among all European cities of comparable size. The FDI Index is published by the Marketing Analysis Department of The Financial Times, Britain’s leading financial newspaper, which surveyed 367 cities and metropolitan areas for this study. According to the survey, in the last four years Basel made significant gains as a place for doing business, leaving cities such as Cambridge (UK), Luxembourg (LUX), Espoo (FIN), Slough (UK) und Cork (IRL) behind it. Cork has continued to do well and this year has again taken the second position. On the other hand, Cambridge and Luxembourg were ranked again as mid-tier European cities from the point of view of attractiveness as business locations. The city of Geneva, which was positioned as number 5 in 2018, moved up the ranking and now occupies fourth place for the first time. Swiss cities also come out well both in the major cities and small cities categories. Zug, for instance, is at the top of the table for small cities and Zurich occupies the same position for medium-sized cities.
  • In the overall ranking of the Cities in Motion Index compiled by the university of Navarre, Basel is very favourably positioned in comparison to other cities of comparable size. Thus in 2022, Basel, a city of 600,000 inhabitants where the Rhine bends northwards on its way to the sea, is ranked as the world’s second most attractive city, a position it also held in 2020. Basel comes out ahead of Reykjavík (IS), Canberra (AUS) and Wellington (NZ). The new front-runner is Bern. Thus at the same time two Swiss cities are placed among the top five of the world’s most attractive small cities. A further point is that Geneva, in second place in the “Small cities” category and Zurich in fifth place in the “Medium-sized cities” category, also perform exceedingly well.
  • The 2022 edition of the most authoritative ranking of the world’s universities, the Shanghai Academic Ranking of World Universities ARWU, places the University of Basel as number 83 among the 100 best universities in the world, meaning that it has continued its upward movement in the last three years.

Further information