The detailed report is available from the Economist Intelligence Unit for a hefty $250, so I had to make do with what the news media was reporting.
Some of the criteria used to come to this conclusion include: health care, education, infrastructure, culture and environment.
My short take on this is that all of these require large amounts of public funds to function. Even culture (museum construction, film festivals, etc.) has become a major government-funded affair.
Vancouver topped the list and Calgary tied fifth with Perth (Australia), so that’s three Canadian cities in the top five. All there, I would wager, for similar reasons that Toronto made the top five.
I don’t know how Vienna (second) and Melbourne (third) fare in terms of big government, but I would think there is quite a lot of it in Vienna, being a European city.
So, I would say the survey was biased in terms of finding more socialistic, big government trends (without explicitly saying so).
But, more on this later.
