cost of living

Tokyo Tops List Of Most Expensive Cities

Where is it most expensive to live as an expatriate? According to the latest Cost of Living Survey from Mercer you are going to spend the most in Japan. Tokyo owns the top spot with Osaka zooming up to second, up nine places since last year. In third place is Moscow which was first last year. Geneva rose four places to fourth position and Hong Kong rounds up the top five. The Mercer's survey uses New York s the base city for the index and scores 100 points. All cities are compared against New York and currency movements are measured against the US dollar. By this measure Tokyo scores 143.7 points and is nearly three times as costly as Johannesburg which has an index score of 49.6 and is at the bottom of the list of 143 cities across six continents. The list measures the comparative cost of over 200 items in each location and takes housing, transport, food, clothing, household goods and entertainment into account. The survey is conducted to help corporations set pay rates for international employees.

Some cities fell dramatically in the rankings. Warsaw was down 78 places from 35th to 113th. London was down 13 places to 16th, Sydney has dropped 51 places from 15th to 66th and Mumbai went from 48th place to 66th. Meanwhile cities in the US, China, Japan and the Middle East went up in the ranks. In a press release, Nathalie Constantin-Métral, a senior researcher at Mercer said that the economic downturn has caused fluctuations in most of the world's currencies leading to the reshuffling of the ranks.

[via Bloomberg]

Source

Tags: cost of living, CostOfLiving, japan, most expensive cities, MostExpensiveCities, osaka, tokyo

Moscow Tops Priciest Cities List, Again

by Rigel Celeste (RSS feed) —

Filed under: Luxury Travel & Hotels

The list of 2007's priciest cities is out, and Moscow gets spot #1 for the second year in a row. The top 50 includes a whopping 30 European cities, with London jumping 3 spots to claim 2nd place and Copenhagen, Geneva, Zurich, and Oslo also making the top 10. It looks like New York was the highest ranking U.S. city, falling in the teens just behind Milan, St Petersberg, and Paris.

A number of factors contributed to the high cost of living ranking for so many European cities, and the Swiss consulting firm Mercer that conducted the survey credits both rises in accommodation prices (especially in London and Moscow) and the strength of the various European currencies.

Source

Tags: 2007, cities, city, cost, cost of living, CostOfLiving, costs, expensive, london, moscow, most expensive, MostExpensive, priciest