Economists tend to attribute productivity differences to quantitative factors such as capital investment and workforce skills, both areas in which the UK trails.
The EIU explains how its ranking is drawn up: "Every city is assigned a rating of relative comfort for over 30 qualitative and quantitative factors across five broad categories: stability; healthcare; culture and environment; education; and infrastructure.
Besides public comments, the evaluation of the plans will be based on quantitative factors like cost, potential financing, traffic impact, engineering considerations and the staging of the development, Mr. Tomson said.
Each city is assigned a score for over 30 qualitative and quantitative factors across five broad categories: stability, health care, culture and environment, education, and infrastructure.
Both qualitative and quantitative factors were investigated.
Two qualitative and five quantitative factors were examined.
The more quantitative factors had even higher reproducibility amongst the experienced observers.
In addition, the constructed designs may have clustered points for the quantitative factors or cannot accommodate many quantitative factors, especially for two-level qualitative factors.
Considering only quantitative factors and ignoring qualitative ones likely distorts the final recommendation results.
Thus, they ignore causal interrelationships with qualitative factors that are believed to significantly impact quantitative factors.
Quantitative factors included mobile phase pH, flow rate, temperature of column and detector, and injection volume.
