More than pinch... a dump-truck full perhaps.

This sort of list, backed by impressive-sounding acronymonic international agencies or well-known publications (even fairly respected outfits like The Economist pull this sort of stunt way too often) pops up regularly on all sorts of righteous-sounding topics ("Most Green City," that kind of thing). Typically they claim some sort of quantitative legitimacy but the results have little apparent connection with the real world.

The fundamental problem seems to be that such things are extremely hard to define, much less measure, and so being not really willing to do the really hard work of trying to find a definition that really works, the writers fall back to just using whatever measures they can find that are easy to evaluate and have some sort of vaguely appropriate name. As you'd expect, the results are consequently barely better than random.

There's little real repercussion, the winners crow a bit, some pompous headlines are written, buzzwords are sprinkled liberally, and nobody else really cares.