Toronto has been ranked the best city to live in the world by the Economist. The ranking aggregates Toronto's performance across a range of indexes, which include safety, livability and cost of living. National level rankings like the Economist's Democracy and Global Food Security Index were also factored into the overall rank. So, like, we're the best. Give yourself a pat on the back.

The overall rankings come as part of a new survey from the Economist Intelligence Unit that ranks cities based on how safe they are. According to this report, Toronto is the safest city in North America and eighth-ranked city in the world, trailing Tokyo, Singapore, Osaka, Stockholm, Amsterdam, Sydney, and Zurich. The safety index is ranked according to the following criteria: digital security, health security, infrastructure and personal safety.

In the overall rankings (what the Economist calls the "index of indexes") Toronto has only one category in which it doesn't rank in the top 10 globally. Can you guess what it is? Yep, cost of living. In this category, our city comes in 70th place. That's not really surprising, and for what it's worth, most of the other cities in the top 10 of the overall rankings are deemed to be more expensive than Toronto.

I guess we should remind ourselves of how good we have it the next time we're inclined to complain about tough commutes and winter weather (yeah, right -- like we're going to stop complaining).

Photo by jeffisy in the blogTO Flickr pool.