This Is the World’s Most Dangerous City

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Aug 30, 8:53AM EDT · Published Aug 29, 9:09AM EDT

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This Is the World’s Most Dangerous City — © nasonurb / Flickr

What goes into an evaluation of whether a city is safe. Crime? Personal liberty? Dangerously dirty air? Bad weather brought on by climate change? The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) released its biennial Safe Cities Index, which attempts to answer the question.

The study looks at five factors of security: digital security, health security, infrastructure security, personal security and environmental security. Each of these metrics is measured across 60 cities, with a total possible score of 100. Additionally, each of these is divided into more specific measures, so the total number of factors for the grade cover 76 indicators.

Among the broad factors that affect the ranking is the rise of COVID-19 across the world and its presence in the world’s largest cities. As Fang Zhao, professor of innovation and strategy at Staffordshire Business School, said in the report, “covid-19 has changed the whole concept of urban safety.”

The report is sponsored by the NEC Corporation, which has an unusually visible presence in the EIU study.

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Cities were rated on a scale of 0 to 100. Their safety was categorized as very high (75.1 to 100), high (50.1 to 75), medium (25.1 to 50) and low (0 to 25).

All the cities with the lowest ratings were in underdeveloped or emerging nations. The city with the worst rating was Yangon, the largest city in Myanmar. Known for its aging infrastructure and poverty, the city has a population of about 5.2 million people. Its health care system is also considered substandard. Myanmar received a score of 39.5. The next worse was Karachi (39.7), the largest city in Pakistan, followed by Caracas (40.5), the capital of Venezuela.

The safest cities are in highly developed nations, including Australia, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, South Korea, Spain and the United States. The top-rated city, at 82.4, is Copenhagen, followed by Toronto (82.2), Singapore (80.7), Sydney (80.1), Tokyo (80.0), Amsterdam (79.3) and Wellington (79.0). The top-rated U.S. city was New York (77.8).

Click here to read about the world’s safest city.
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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.