2014 Annual Indices for Expatriates and Ordinary Residents on Cost of Living, Wages and Purchasing Power for World's Major Cities

Introduction

“…Relatedly, these studies also complement our research on city-level economies, namely, on cost of living and purchasing power (Tan et al, 2016b;Tan and Luu, 2016), as well as liveability (Tan et al, 2012).…”

Measuring Cost of Living for Ordinary Residents in Cities: A New Index

“…The costs of living between these two groups tend to be different due to their differing lifestyles, incomes and spending patterns. This paper expands on the earlier work in Tan et al (2015) which makes a clear distinction between the cost of living for locals and expatriates across cities worldwide (Tan and Luu, 2016).…”

“…Admittedly, despite the considerable difficulty confronting the measurement of standards of living, it appears that the discourse in the traditional economics literature about standard of living measurement appears to be intertwined with that of the discussion about cost of living, more specifically centered on consumption and income based measures. For instance, Blackorby and Russell (1978) posit that there is a direct proportional relationship between standard of living and cost of living, defining the cost of living index as "the ratio of costs of realizing a particular indifference surface or 1 For more discussion, see Tan et al (2015). It is pertinent to note that the two other popular studies on cost of living that exists today come from the Economist Intelligent Unit (EIU) and Mercer.…”

“…Future research could also analyze the changes in the composition of consumer baskets over time as longitudinal studies may be interesting, as indicated by the composition of retained imports for consumption by ordinary citizens. Source: Tan et al (2015) This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.…”

Understanding and Tracking Cost of Living, Wages and Purchasing Power for Expatriates and Ordinary Residents

“…At the same time, improving ordinary residents' quality of life has also become the "rallying cry of many big-city mayors" around the globe. 12 In , we have examined the nexus between the cost of living, purchasing power and liveability whereby the latter is measured by the Global Liveable City Index (GLCI) as presented in Tan, Nie, and Baek (2017). We found that liveability does not explain the cost of living despite a generally positive association.…”