The US now ranks only 16th for being the most desirable place to be born in, having once held the top spot in 1988, according to a report by the Economist Intelligence Unit. Today, Singapore and Hong Kong rank among the “luckiest” places.

Switzerland, meanwhile, retains the top ranking, shrugging off worries about retaining its status as the world’s biggest offshore financial center, the EIU report said.

The US held the top spot when the rankings were introduced in 1988 for the first time.

The rankings appear in an article for the Economist, called 'The lottery of life', by Laza Kekic, director for country forecasting at the Economist Intelligence Unit, and it is published in The World in 2013, the latest edition in the publication's annual series on the year ahead.

As Kekic writes: "Quibblers will, of course, find more holes in all this than there are in a chunk of Swiss cheese. America was helped to the top spot back in 1988 by the inclusion in the ranking of a `philistine factor' (for cultural poverty) and a `yawn index' (the degree to which a country might, despite all its virtues, be irredeemably boring). Switzerland scored terribly on both counts. In the film `The Third Man', Orson Welles’ character, the rogue Harry Lime, famously says that Italy for 30 years had war, terror and murder under the Borgias but in that time produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance; Switzerland had 500 years of peace and democracy—and produced the cuckoo clock. However, there is surely a lot to be said for boring stability in today’s (and no doubt tomorrow’s) uncertain times."

Behind Switzerland in the top spot is Australia (2); Norway (3); Sweden (4); Denmark (5); Singapore (6); New Zealand (7); Netherlands (8); Canada (9), and Hong Kong in 10^th place. Taiwan is at 14^th, while other Asian jurisdictions mentioned include South Korea, at 19^th, and Japan, at 25^th.

Further afield, the UK stands at 27^th, Germany at 16^th (jointly with the US) and France at 26^th, the EIU said. Nigeria ranked, at 80^th, as the worst place to enter the world in 2013.

The list takes into factors such as geography, demography, social and cultural characteristics, as well as economic factors to determine the quality of life across countries. Specific indicators include GDP per head, life expectancy at birth, quality of family life, political freedom, job security, climate, personal security, community life, governance and gender equality.