The Grand Duchy’s capital is tied with a major Swiss city as 4th most liveable location for European expats moving within Europe, an international relocation consultancy has said. However it scored lower in the top 20 for North American and Asian expats, according to ECA International’s annual “Location Ratings System”, released last week.

The database “measures the quality of expatriate living conditions in over 450 locations around the world to arrive at a fair and consistent assessment of the level of difficulty the expatriate will experience in adapting to a new location,” ECA said in a 22 January announcement.

“Luxembourg City is joint 4th globally with Geneva,” Neil Ashman, a senior location ratings analyst at the firm, told Delano on Wednesday. “As such it scores well across the different factors we measure to help companies set allowances to compensate employees they send around the world on assignment.”

“For example, it’s relatively safe,” Ashman said. “It has good facilities for expats including housing, schooling and expat community. It has good infrastructure, transport and availability of goods and services.”

“Our location allowance system also takes into account where someone is moving from, since some of the factors we analyse will be affected by this,” the analyst stated. “So, on a North American base, i.e., someone coming from North America to Luxembourg, Luxembourg City ranks 14th globally and on an Asia base the city come 15th globally.”

According to Ashman: “The distance and some language and culture barriers contribute to it being slightly lower for someone coming from these regions but universally it does well: the level of adjustment required for an international assignee to live and work there is minimal.”

Switzerland, Benelux, Nordic regions lead

For European expats, the Grand Duchy’s capital ranked below Bern, Copenhagen and third placed The Hague, and just above Basel, Stavanger (in Norway’s oil producing region) and, in a four-way tie at 8th place, Antwerp, Dublin, Eindhoven and Gothenburg. Other cities in the top 20 table included Frankfurt, Zurich, Berlin and Strasbourg.

“Chisinau, Moldova, ranked 192nd [globally], is Europe’s least liveable city,” the company said in its announcement.

Outside of Europe the best locations for European expats in North America was Toronto, in Latin America was Santiago, in Australia was Canberra, in Asia was Singapore, in the Middle East was Tel Aviv, and in Africa was Port Louis, Mauritius.

“Globally, the hardest locations to adapt to living and working in are the Afghan locations of Lashkar Gah and Kandahar,” ECA said.