Price and earnings
I like a good statistic, I do, so I was delighted when a kind friend forwarded me a UBS report entitled Prices and Earnings: A Comparison of Purchasing Power Around the Globe 2009.
This report is not the fluffy ‘you can buy a decent martini after 10pm’ malarky from Monocle’s best cities ever article that I recently wrote about. No, it is the hard stuff you need to look at before you really open that second office in Sofia or decide whether you should take that transfer to Oslo.
So here for my fellow fact fans, are my selected highlights:
- If you want cold, hard cash move to Switzerland. Employees in Zurich and Geneva have the highest net earnings in the world. Mind you, they also have the highest living expenses as well so it all evens out in the end I suppose.
- You could proabably already guess that tax is high in Scandanavia, but did you know that it’s equally high in Ljubljana? In Slovenia you pay 39% of your gross income in tax, compared to 22% in London, 23% in Sydney, 26% in Paris and 28% in New York.
- If you prefer a nice slacker job with minimal hours, then go to Paris, Madrid, Copenhagen and Nicosia where employees only work around 1,600 hours per year, compared to the 1,747 you would work in Sydney, 1,762 in London, 1,928 in LA, 2,295 in Hong Kong or 2,373 in Cairo.
- For the good folk at UBS who put this report together, a ‘complete ladies’ outfit consists of a suit, blazer, summer dress, pantyhose and a pair of shoes and a men’s wardrobe comprises a suit, blazer, shirt, jeans, socks and shoes. If you want to get these items cheap, then you need to move to Kuala Lumpur, Manilla or Johannesburg. Don’t go to Tokyo or Vienna.
- If you don’t want to pay your PA much, Manila is the place for you. Instead of the average $US 38,000 you’d have to shell out in Western Europe, you only need to pay them $US 2,400 in the Philippines. Similarly, if you want a cook, you’ll get one cheap in Jakarta ($US 4,300) or Lima ($US 7,500).
- An average wage earner in Zurich or New York can afford to buy an iPod nano after only nine hours work, and in London, 11 hours. Workers in Mumbai, however, need roughly the equivalent of a month’s salary.
- More importantly, the working time required to buy 1kg of rice is 8 in London, 9 in Zurich, 11 in LA, 38 in Manilla, 49 in Nairobi, 58 in Delhi and 65 in Budapest.
Verdict: Perhaps we should all go and visit Oxfam’s website.