Bucharest is outranked by Moscow and Prague, tied with Warsaw and outranks Budapest. Polled by Cushman & Wakefield, the top 500 companies in Europe believe that Bucharest is making an effort to improve the business climate, but not as big an effort as Barcelona or Madrid, which lead the race for pleasing corporations looking to set up shop in a new city. When it comes
to transportation, the perception is that Bucharest has improved internal transportation and therefore moved up from 30th to 26th as far as this subject is concerned. Budapest ranked 31st, Warsaw 30th and Prague also 26th. External transportation is a totally different subject, as Bucharest placed last among the top 34 European cities of importance business-wise, while Budapest moved up from 33rd to 26th. In terms of access to markets, Bucharest moved up 8 spots to 24th and tied with Stockholm and Istanbul. Rome, Vienna and Athens ranked below. 

This newsletter covers information available as at 31 October 2008 Budapest (22nd), Prague (21st) and Warsaw (15th) did better. London placed 1st. Bucharest managed to secure the 2nd position based on the cost of labor, but multinationals are hardly pleased with the qualification of Bucharest employees and placed the city on the 32nd position. Besides a low cost of labor and plenty of room for quality of labor improvement, Bucharest is also offering tremendous opportunities to improve the quality of life for the employees, as the city managed to place 31st in this department. The top five criteria that do matter are qualified labor availability, easy access to markets, customers and consumers, telecom quality, transportation networks and the cost of labor. Bucharest has managed to improve its perception in terms of pollution and moved up from 32nd to 30th. Getting
office space in Bucharest is no longer as cheap as it used to be. The city fell from the 2nd position last year to the 13th. Office space in Bucharest is both expensive and hard to get, as the availability indicator plunged a whooping 18 spots to the 28th
position. Telecommunications have improved in Bucharest and the city now stands in the 29th position (32nd last year), above Budapest, Warsaw and Prague, which share the 31st position. The authorities’ financial efforts to encourage business
(such as tax cuts and other incentives) placed Bucharest on the 11th position, down by one from last year. Despite being the 3rd choice for business expansion in Europe, only 14% of the respondents believe that Bucharest is a known venue for
business. London is by far the most popular (82%), while Paris is second (77%). Moscow should be expecting the highest number of multinationals in the next 5 years.