From The Economist, June 8:
Amoral cities are flourishing in a turbulent geopolitical era
Our index ranks economic performance over the past three years
Singapore’s immaculate Changi airport is the perfect place to witness a shift in the balance of power between global cities. Since the city-state’s final covid-19 border restrictions were lifted last year, it has welcomed crowds of bankers, consultants and lawyers, fresh off a four-hour flight from Hong Kong or Shanghai, and often arriving without a return ticket. Singapore’s neutrality is pivotal in a region where the rupture between America and China feels especially immediate.
In most cities the twin blows of covid and geopolitical tension have proved more of a problem. In order to assess which are thriving in this new era, The Economist has compiled a rough-and-ready index. It scrutinises a sample of ten locations, looking at changes in four measures—population, economic growth, office vacancies and house prices—over the past three years. We rank each city by how it has performed on the measures to create an overall score.
Miami claims top spot thanks to strong economic growth and an extremely perky property market: real house prices leapt by 39.5% from 2019 to 2022. Singapore is next, benefiting from gdp growth of 6.9%, and only a small rise in office vacancies. Dubai, meanwhile, has seen its population jump by 5.8%. It is also the only city in the index where office vacancies have dropped. At the other end of the table is San Francisco, where the population has fallen by 8.3%.*****What explains this contrasting performance? Covid plays a part. Cities in bits of the world that did not go overboard with restrictions, such as Dubai and Miami, benefited—sometimes at the expense of those that did, like San Francisco. International overnight visits to Singapore may have been three-quarters lower at the end of 2022 than before covid, according to Oxford Economics, a consultancy, but life was pretty good when compared with its rivals, Hong Kong and Shanghai, where tough restrictions on movement lasted longer. Indeed, thanks to falling rents, Hong Kong has lost its top spot in a ranking by hsbc, a bank, of the world’s most expensive cities.Singapore has also sucked up firms and workers fleeing Xi Jinping’s authoritarianism. Much like Dubai in the Middle East, it serves as a place where anyone can do business with anyone....
....MUCH MORE, including the chart of the ten in their ranking system.
Here's a tidbit for ya:
"Singapore has thrown tax breaks at family offices, helping lift their number to 1,500 in 2022, from 50 in 2018."
