A Multivariate Analysis of the Determinants of Urban Quality of Life in the World's Largest Metropolitan Areas

The urban living standard index of the Population Crisis Committee, based on 10 indicators of urban quality of life for the 98 largest metropolitan cities of the world, has been used in this paper to create three groups of cities: those having high, medium, and low standards of living. The discriminant analysis technique has been applied for identifying those measures that contribute most in discriminating the three groups. The adequacy of the technique has been demonstrated by the fact that 97 per cent of the cases have been correctly classified. The first discriminant function accounted for 93 per cent of the total discriminable variance. The analysis shows that food cost, measured by the percentage of income spent on food, is the most influential discriminator among the three groups of cities. The other important discriminators are living space (number of persons per room), housing standard (percentage of homes with water/electricity), communication (number of telephones per 100 persons), education (percentage of children in secondary school), and infant mortality rate (infant deaths per 1000 live births). Implications are discussed.