|
Worldwide Cost of Living
The city-by-city guide to the costs of living and working overseas
The
Economist Intelligence Unit’s Worldwide Cost of Living service is
the ultimate Internet tool for calculating
cost-of-living and hardship allowances for expatriates and business
travellers, and building compensation
packages to match. Covering the cost of
more than 160 products and services in over 135
cities in 92 countries, this service gives you the information you
want, when you want it. It enables you to
select just the data you need for the
specific cities relevant to your business. It allows you to include
or exclude specific items—company cars, for example—and to
change currencies and exchange rates so that the service always
reflects your company’s individual
compensation policies. The service also
includes a hardship index that rates each city on the level
of day-to-day hardship it presents for expatriate employees.
How
will Worldwide Cost of Living help you?
• Compare
cost-of-living differences across as many cities as you
like.
• Access all our data on a
particular city to gain a complete picture
of its price levels and business costs.
• Download the data straight to your
desktop in Excel®—you can then feed
the raw figures into your own compensation models and
software applications.
• Access background information on the
local environment in each city, from
the hardship index to the housing market.
• Dynamically plot the data online as
bar charts or line graphs.
• Build cost-of-living
allowances into compensation packages with
our online salary calculator.
What
prices are provided?
The
survey gathers detailed information on the cost of more than 160
items—from food, toiletries and clothing to domestic help, transport
and utility bills—in every city. More than 50,000 individual
prices are collected in each survey round, and
surveys are updated each June and
December. A cost-of-living index is calculated from the
price data to express the difference in the cost of living between
any two cities. The prices are broken down as
follows:
Food
STAPLES: white bread, butter, margarine, white rice, spaghetti,
flour, sugar, cheese, cornflakes, yogurt,
milk, olive oil, and peanut or corn
oil.
FRESH FRUIT AND VEGETABLES: potatoes, onions, mushrooms,tomatoes,
carrots, oranges, apples, lemons, bananas, lettuce and
eggs.
CANNED FOOD: peas, tomatoes, peaches and sliced pineapples.
MEAT AND FISH: beef, veal, lamb, pork, ham, bacon, chicken, frozen
fish and fresh fish.
BEVERAGES: instant coffee, ground coffee, tea bags, cocoa, drinking
chocolate, Coca-Cola, tonic water, mineral
water and orange juice.
Alcohol
Wine,
beer, scotch whisky, gin, vermouth, cognac and liqueur.
Household
supplies
Soap,
laundry detergent, toilet tissue, dishwashing liquid, insect-killer
spray, light bulbs, batteries, frying pan, electric toaster,
laundry and dry cleaning.
Personal care
Aspirins, razor blades, toothpaste, facial
tissues, hand lotion,shampoo & conditioner, lipstick and
haircuts.
Tobacco
Marlboro
cigarettes, local cigarettes and pipe tobacco.
Clothing
MEN’S:
business suit, shirt and shoes, raincoat and wool mixture
socks.
WOMEN’S: daytime dress, town shoes, cardigan, raincoat, and tights
or panty hose.
CHILDREN’S: jeans, dress shoes, sportswear shoes, girl’s dress,
boy’s dress jacket, boy’s dress
trousers.
Utilities
Telephone
rental and call charges, average gas bill, average electricity
bill, average water bill and average heating oil costs.
Domestic help
Domestic
cleaning rates, maid’s monthly wages and babysitter’s hourly
rate.
Recreation
Compact
disc album, colour TV, personal computer, colour film, colour
picture development, foreign and local newspapers, international
weekly news magazine, paperbacks, three-course dinner,
and cinema and theatre seats.
Transport
CAR
PRICES: low-priced car, compact car, family car and deluxe car.
CAR MAINTENANCE: yearly road tax or registration, tune-up, car
insurance, regular unleaded petrol.
TAXI PRICES: initial meter charge, additional kilometre and airport
to city centre rates.
Housing rents
Rents
for furnished residential apartments, unfurnished residential
apartments, furnished residential houses and unfurnished
residential houses.
Schools, health
and sports
INTERNATIONAL
SCHOOLS: tuition fees, extra costs and kindergarten at
French, German and American/English schools.
HEALTH AND SPORTS: routine check-up, dentist visit, greens fees
on public golf course, hourly rate for tennis
court, six tennis balls,
entrance fee to public swimming pool.
Business trip
costs
Typical
daily cost of a business trip, hotel charge, hire car costs, meal
price, fast-food snack, regular unleaded petrol, taxi rates, international
and local newspapers, international weekly news magazine,
seat at cinema.
Disposable income
(not available for every city)
Percentage
of gross salary remaining after taxes and deductions for
single person, married person and person with children.
Introducing
our hardship index
The
Economist Intelligence Unit’s hardship index quantifies the
level of hardship in all of the locations
covered by the Worldwide
Cost of Living Survey. There are three broad categories of hardship:
Health and safety; Culture and environment;
and Infrastructure. In
each section a mixture of quantitative and qualitative data are
used, which are combined to give an
overall hardship score. The hardship
index is supplemented by an extensive city information report.
Which cities does Worldwide Cost of Living cover?
Abidjan, Abu Dhabi, Adelaide, Al Khobar, Algiers, Amman, Almaty,
Amsterdam, Asunción, Athens, Atlanta,
Auckland, Bahrain, Baku,
Bandar Seri Begawan, Bangkok, Barcelona, Beijing, Belgrade, Berlin,
Bogotá, Boston, Bratislava, Brisbane, Brussels, Bucharest, Budapest,
Buenos Aires, Cairo, Calgary, Caracas, Casablanca, Chicago,
Cleveland, Colombo, Copenhagen, Dakar, Dalian, Damascus,
Detroit, Dhaka, Doha, Douala, Dubai, Dublin, Düsseldorf,
Frankfurt, Geneva, Guangzhou, Guatemala, Hamburg, Hanoi,
Harare, Helsinki, Ho Chi Minh, Hong Kong, Honolulu, Houston,
Istanbul, Jakarta, Jeddah, Johannesburg, Karachi, Kiev, Kuala
Lumpur, Kuwait, Lagos, Lexington, Lima, Lisbon, London, Los
Angeles, Lusaka, Luxembourg, Lyon, Madrid, Manchester, Manila,
Melbourne, Mexico City, Miami, Milan, Minneapolis, Montevideo,
Montreal, Moscow, Mumbai, Munich, Muscat, Nairobi, New
Delhi, New York, Osaka Kobe, Oslo, Panama City, Paris, Perth,
Phnom Penh, Pittsburgh, Port Moresby, Prague, Pretoria, Quito,
Reykjavík, Rio de Janeiro, Riyadh, Rome, San
Francisco, San Jose, San Juan,
Santiago, São Paulo, Seattle, Seoul, Shanghai, Shenzhen,
Singapore, Sofia, St Petersburg, Stockholm, Sydney, Taipei,
Tashkent, Tehran, Tel Aviv, Tianjin, Tokyo, Toronto, Tripoli,
Tunis, Vancouver, Vienna, Warsaw, Washington,
Wellington, Zurich
Where
does Worldwide Cost of Living get its data?
The prices in the Worldwide Cost of
Living Survey are collected twice a
year by Economist Intelligence Unit researchers. Prices are
gathered from supermarkets, medium-priced retailers and more
expensive speciality shops, so different types of distribution
channels can be compared. The prices are not
recommended retail prices or
manufacturers’ costs—they reflect what the paying customer
is charged. The Economist Intelligence
Unit devotes considerable resources to data
collection, analysis and forecasting. We have more than 130 fulltime
analysts and economists based in our offices
in London, New York, Hong Kong, Vienna
and other locations worldwide. To support this
team, we maintain a global network of more than 500 analysts.
About our partner, e-Numerate Solutions Inc
The Economist Intelligence Unit developed the Worldwide Cost
of Living site in association with e-Numerate
Solutions Inc. e-Numerate Solutions has
invented a numbers-based computer language
that is revolutionising the way the world analyses, displays and
shares numbers. By combining our data and analysis with e-Numerate’s
software, we have created an Internet service that enables
you to graph, manipulate, compare, search, import and display
cost-of-living indices instantly, with point-and-click ease.
How
to subscribe:
For more information or to apply for
a free trial, contact the exclusive representatives for the SAARC
region:
 |
Bharat Book Bureau |
|
207,Hermes Atrium, |
|
Sector 11, C.B.D Belapur, |
|
Navi Mumbai - 400614. India |
|
TeleFax:+91-(022)-27578668 / 27579438 |
|
Website:www.bharatbook.com |
|
E-mail:eiu@bharatbook.com |
|
