European Executives Rate Geneva Highly
A new ranking of the most attractive European cities has placed Geneva and Zurich in the top 15 most desirable cities for European businessmen.
The study was awaited with a certain amount of anxiety by the various offices for economic promotion of the major European cities. The ranking was done by Cushman and Wakefield, one of the most important companies active in international real-estate and based in London.
Not surprisingly, London was ranked number one just ahead of Paris, as the best place in Europe for setting up a business headquarters. Geneva rose eight spots from last year.
The top nine this year — London, Paris, Francfort, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Brussels, Madrid, Berlin, and Munich — were also the top nine last year.
Geneva is ranked 12th this year and Zurich 13th. Last year Geneva was 20th and Zurich 10th, so that in terms of most desirable Swiss city for European executives, Geneva is now slightly more interesting than Zurich, though the reasons for this change remain opaque. They may be due simply to the burgeoning real-estate market in the Geneva area.
Accroding to Robert Curzon Price, who runs the Geneva company SPG Intercity (Which is the Swiss partner of London’s Cushman & Wakefield), Geneva is geographically at the center of Europe and benefits from and excellent communication network and links with other cities and countries.
The other important factor, he added, was that the quality of life in Geneva is highly appreciated by expatriates — Geneva is the preferred city (to live in) of European executives just behind Barcelona.
It is hard to see in his explanation of the ranking what had possibly changed from last year as Geneva’s physical location at the heart of Europe has not changed, despite some erosion of the glaciers, and if anything, the standard of living has unmistakeably declined steadily over the past 5 years as Switzerland has self-inflicted a gradual levelling with the rest of Europe, through the opening of its borders. Although no one would argue that the standard of living in Switzerland remains high when compared to many other European countries.
The ranking, which is filled with lots of verbiage, explains that principal attractions of the canton by comparing them to other large European cities. In summary, European managers appreciated the faciliated access to global markets as well as the telecoms infrastructure, the multilingual residents, the transprotation infrastructure, and the quality of life for employees (Geneva is ranked #2 for this aspect).
One of the interesting data to come out recently is that Switzerland leads in overtime. This is a very intersting figure for Swiss employers. In 2006, Switzerland clocked 180 million overtime hours, translating to the equivalent of 90,000 full time jobs.
The phenomenon is particularly important in the domain of finance where employees accumulate on average 90 overtime hours per year. In comparison, bank employees in Germany and Great Britain do on average 8 hours per year. Swiss beat the records as well for hours in the work week — clocking on average 41.7 hours.
