Archives for February 5th, 2007

France (shown above, burning) has the greatest quality of life in the world.

International Living has released their Quality of Life Index 2007, and Slovenia totally got the shaft. The little Alpine wonderland came in 32nd place, well behind all of its immediate neighbors. France, in the meantime, was crowned number one.

I can’t say I have too much confidence in those results, and not just because France won. For one thing, their 2007 rankings include Yugoslavia — a country that officially stopped existing four years ago…

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In other words, these guys aren’t too serious. Their Slovenia section certainly doesn’t make you think otherwise. They’ve got two fluff stories, one of which opens up with the nonsensical statement: “Ljubljana, the tiny capital of the even tinier independent state of Slovenia.” (Wait, what? So Slovenia is smaller than Ljubljana?)

And when you look at Slovenia’s scores in the survey, you’ll also notice something odd. Obviously stuff like this can never be an exact science. But a lot of their scores are just absolutely absurd. For the category climate, they give top marks to Zimbabwe, Malta, and South Africa. So, obviously, warm places are getting the most points. Fine. But why are landlocked Austria and Hungary ahead of Slovenia? Slovenia has a nice little strip of coast, and nice weather because of this. How does Austria score higher?

Even worse is the category for infrastructure. This was Slovenia’s worst category, by the way, with only 40 points out of 100, which is crazy. Slovenia has brand-spanking-new highways traversing the country and a booming airport, and yet it still finished behind Bosnia, Gambia, and Bangladesh(!) Not to mention Croatia, whose infrastructure is considered better than Austria’s. (??)

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All in all, Croatia did extremely well. It finished in 16th place in the quality of living survey — so, ahead of places like Canada, Sweden, and the U.K., and International Living lists it as one of 15 countries that constitute the “world’s top havens.” I know that Croatia is beautiful, but their spectacular results seemed suspicious to me.

Sure enough: Just digging through the site revealed that the editor and the publisher bought property in Croatia. Their experiences, humorously enough, seem to be nothing short of chaotic — they aren’t even sure what they bought, don’t have direct access to a road, and seem to be entirely reliant on locals for everything — but they still croon about the cheap value. It’s clearly an investment they’re excited about. And, of course, I don’t think it hurts them that their publication trumpets Croatia as having a world-class standard of living…

By the way, you’ll never guess where they live otherwise. I’ll give you a hint: It’s the winner of their survey to find the greatest quality of life in the world: France! What a coincidence, no?

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