Auckland city has lost its Top 10 liveability ranking by The Economist

Auckland has been elbowed out of the Top 10 in one the main global listings of "liveable cities"

The only New Zealand city to have been in The Economist's Top 10, Auckland has fallen from 8th to 12th, as Osaka, Tokyo, Sydney and Copenhagen move up.

Vienna has taken the top slot, ending Melbourne's record seven-year run at the top of the global league.

The rankings by The Economist's intelligence unit, are based on 30 factors in five groups: stability, infrastructure, education, health care and environment.

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"Although four cities have fallen from the top 10 over the past year — Auckland (from 8th to 12th), Perth (from 7th to 14th), Helsinki (from 9th to 16th) and Hamburg (from 10th to 18th) — none of these have seen a fall in their overall scores during this period," said the latest report.

"Auckland has in fact registered a minor improvement. Changes in liveability elsewhere can therefore have a significant impact on the rankings of individual cities.

"Osaka's improvements in scores for quality and availability of public transportation, as well as a consistent decline in crime rates, have contributed to higher ratings in the infrastructure and stability categories respectively," said the unit's report.

The ambition to be "The World's Most Liveable City" had been the slogan promoted by Len Brown, the first mayor of the amalgamated Auckland from 2010.

It has since been dropped by his successor Phil Goff, and the the city's economic development agency ATEED said it's now all about "jobs".

After Vienna and Melbourne at the head of the list, the rest of the top 10 is made up of Osaka, Calgary, Sydney, Vancouver, Toronto, Tokyo, Copenhagen and Adelaide.

The least liveable of the 140 cities assessed were Nigeria's Lagos, Bangladesh's Dhaka, with the Syrian city of Damascus at the bottom.

The nearest to New Zealand was Port Moresby in Papua New Guinea, at 136.