Photo credit: Quezon City government
man, Ateneo de Manila University, St. Paul University, Miriam College, St. Theresa’s College, and a host of others. And there’s obviously no shortage of health care facilities. In fact, with 20, the city has the most number of hospi-
Top 20 Cities Can’t find your city? Here is the complete list of the top 20: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.
Bacolod Makati Davao Marikina Iloilo Las Piñas Pasig San Fernando Mandaluyong Quezon City
11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.
Manila Batangas Cagayan de Oro Muntinlupa Angeles Baguio Lipa Calamba General Santos Cebu
The Methodology To compile the list, we relied on two existing surveys – the Philippine Human Development Report (PHDR) published by the Human Development Network (HDN) in cooperation with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), and the Philippine Cities Competitiveness Ranking Project (PCCRP) of the Asian Institute of Management (AIM) Policy Center. We figured – why reinvent the wheel? These two organizations have done the nitty-gritty work, far beyond the capability of this magazine. What we’ve done is to shortlist and then rank cities using their results. First, we got the top 30 provinces including Metro Manila based on the 2003 Human Development Index (HDI) of the PHDR. HDI is a summary measure of human development, combining longevity (life expectancy), knowledge (enrollment and high school ratios and functional literacy rate), and standard of living (real income per capita). This measure alone takes into account the most basic factors in choosing which places provide the best environment and opportunities for health, education, and income. But PHDR is down to the provincial level only. So from the 30 provinces, we identified the cities and municipalities classified by the National Statistics Office (NSO) as 1st class income class, ending up with 219 places. Well, we slightly cheated a bit and included a few exceptions, i.e. those that belong to the 2005 PCCRP. It’s at this point where we shifted gears and considered only those included in the AIM study of the most competitive cities. This study is particularly interesting because it used seven key drivers of competitiveness – cost of doing business, dynamism of local economy, linkages and accessibility, infrastructure, human resources, responsiveness of LGUs, and quality of life. These are basically more than what we needed to make a good basis for the list. www.moneysense.com.ph www.moneysense.com.ph
tals in the country. Some of the notable ones are St. Luke’s Medical Center, UERM Memorial Medical Centre, Dr. Jesus C. Delgado Memorial Hospital, FEU-NRMF Hospital, Philippine Heart Center, National Kidney and Transplant Institute, Lung Center of the Philippines, and Philippine Orthopedic Hospital. The city is also a favorite nightspot in the metro. The Timog and Tomas Morato areas, Quezon Avenue, West Avenue, and Libis are major centers of leisure and entertainment. And it is definitely a shopping hub with 17 malls. The SM Group alone has four, including one of the biggest worldwide – SM City-North EDSA. Robinsons and Ever have two each. The Araneta Center, long known for Ali Mall and Farmers Plaza, is undergoing a major facelift, starting with the chic Gateway Mall. Ayala Land, on the other hand, recently opened Trinoma, which has prompted the national government to develop the area as QC’s new 250-hectare central business district.
True, the PCCRP, while expanding in coverage, is still incomplete. Nevertheless, it made it a lot easier to shortlist among the 219 cities and municipalities. OK, the PCCRP included only cities, but it makes sense that cities, especially provincial capitals, have the most to offer in terms of those drivers of competitiveness. From the 65 cities covered by the PCCRP, we included only those that were also in the shortlist of 219 cities and municipalities, with a couple of exceptions (primarily because they were too high on the PCCRP ranking to be ignored). The PCRRP already ranked the cities under three classifications based on population size -- metro, mid-sized, and small. However, we didn’t care as much for some of the seven criteria. We cared only about three – dynamism of local economy (which indicates income opportunities), infrastructure (which relates to availability of modern conveniences), and quality of life (which refers to a clean, safe place to raise a family). As defined by the PCRRP, dynamism of the local economy indicates the capability of the city to attract and foster inward investments. It includes the measurement of the number of household income, local inflation rate, percentage of top 200 corporations, population versus fast food chain locators, market size, consumer price index, vibrancy of tourism sector, expectation in business revenue, business access to financing, and conduciveness of regulatory environment to business. Infrastructure adequacy and quality indicate that the city has sufficient physical, technological, and knowledge support services that are required in transacting business such as road infrastructure, telecommunications, production factors, and transport systems. This criterion includes the number of banks, road density, vehicle density, number of Internet service providers, well-managed road network and traffic, road clearance during peak hours, reliability of electric power services, abundance of water supply, easy connection of telephone lines from other service providers, adequate cellular phone signals, reliability of Internet service providers, and adequate garbage management. Quality of Life determines the quality of environment and life in the city is based on the incidence of theft per 100,000 population, incidence of murder per 100,000 population, hospital beds per 100,000 population, life expectancy at birth, cleanliness of roads and public open spaces, adequacy of rest and recreational facilities, and conduciveness of the security environment to businesses. Just these three criteria already pack a lot of data to provide sufficient basis for ranking our list. We picked the top 20 based on their average ranking using those three criteria and ranked them accordingly. We lopped up the bottom half to come up with our final ranking of the “Best Places to Live.” MoneySense
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