According to the World Bank, the most expensive country in the world is Bermuda. The cheapest is Afghanistan.
I was a little surprised that Taiwan was so low, and that Russia was as low as India.
43 thoughts on “Raw data: The cheapest and most expensive countries to live in”
Comments are closed.
Do we not remember Tucker Carlson going to a Russian supermarket and gushing about the prices of food?
I also remember him not saying what percentage of their weekly income went into buying those cheap groceries.
pffft
details...
Ot that it was a French supermarket just like ones in France, and that many stores (like a lot of Targets) in the US have those magical shopping cart escalators too.
I remember shopping cart escalators well before Target. I can't remember if it was Caldors or Bradlees that had them. There weren't a lot of them around regardless.
Geez, why didn't he go to Afghanistan? Even cheaper there!
Of course, it all depends on how you define "living."
If there’s nothing to buy in the stores, it’s pretty easy to be a cheap place to live.
Likewise, if you’re earning income in American dollars, it’s pretty easy to consume a lot in countries with currencies that have lower purchasing power than the dollar.
None of this helps the 99+% of Americans who cannot move to these other countries. (Most peer countries make it very difficult to emigrate, and most easy-to-get-into countries have grossly lower living standards than Americans will accept.) You might as well put out a chart that says cost of living was cheaper in 1776 than today.
Most peer countries make it very difficult to *immigrate*
OTOH, if you're on a pension in American dollars, it's often pretty easy to get long term resident status in low cost of living countries
"I was a little surprised that . . . Russia was as low as India."
Very little of Russia is Moscow; most of Russia is so poor that people willingly throw their sons into the Ukrainian meat grinder because the meager pension offered to injured vets is actually far better, income-wise, than many other opportunities.
Median montly income in Russia is only a few hundred bucks.
Yeah, a house with only an outhouse is cheap.
There was a time -- it's almost certainly no longer the case -- that Moscow was one of the most expensive cities in the world, on par with London or Zurich, iirc. No longer, I guess. An endless war, sanctions, and a worthless currency will do that, I suppose.
Unlike the US and many other countries the population of Russia has been fairly flat since 1980 but has actually gone down about 10%.
I’m going to buy a retirement villa in Afghanistan. Probably one with a pool
I'm surprised that Western European countries like the UK, Netherlands, and Germany are lower than the U.S. Guess a lot depends on the lifestyle to which you are accustomed.
I've always thought of everywhere in Europe being pricier than the US, and now I'm thinking, geez, France is more affordable? How do I swing this?
One example: France has one of the best (and cheapest) health care systems of the first-world countries. American expats gush about it (lots of YouTube videos).
That's probably it. If the index used takes health care into account, then that would push Europe down the scale, and the U.S. up.
However, in my experience many other things, like housing and energy, tend to be more expensive in Europe, especially since the Ukraine war has driven up fuel costs.
Besides the other public goods already mentioned, food in Germany is much less expensive in general than in the US.
That didn't used to be the case, what has happened?
Since Schroeder, Agenda 2010 and the pauperization of the working force / import of cheap workers from East Europa, the German agrar and food industry slowly displaced the traditionnel productors from France, Italy and others.
The discounters like Aldi and Lidl helped to put the pression on the prices too as well as to bring it through to the German consumers.
You can have cheaper grain due to better conditions for agriculture, but the price of poultry or sausages for instance is massively influenced by the labor cost in industrial type facilities (industrials farms and slaughterhouses).
Look at the trade balances in things like poultry or pork sausages between 2000 and now.
EDIT: and at the hour salary in those industries, mostly located close to east borders.
I remember them being 30 or 40% less, relative to France or Italy, making full use of some lax branches regulations to the Mindestlohn used there.
Not in my experience. Food costs seem to be fairly comparable based on my recent travels, and that includes comparison of grocery prices. There is certainly not a huge difference.
Without digging into the methodology/inputs, I would guess that health care and other public services play a role in that. If you live in a country with good public transit, you don't need to spend as much on transportation, for example.
This is probably a good part of it. Here in Germany I estimate a typical family requires at least one fewer automobile to meet their transportation needs than a family in the US. Of course, in many areas here, it's quite possible to live comfortably without owning any motorized vehicle at all, which is probably only true on a significant scale in NYC.
The methodology/inputs is the key question here... because it too surprised me that Western Europe was rated as having such a lower Cost of Living than the US. How you weigh the various components I imagine produces different results... and there is stuff like exchange rates and taxes and transfer payments to consider.
Anyone out there have any solid idea how World Bank metrics rate compared to others?
I remember seeing ads in France for Internet/cable packages about a decade ago for 40 Euros a month, the US equivalent at the time was at least $120 a month.
And in the 90's their cell phones service was substantially cheaper than ours.
Last but not least wines that sell for $15 to $20 in the US can be found for under 5 Euros at the local supermarket.
"And in the 90's their cell phones service was substantially cheaper than ours."
Which is a fascinating artifact of the telephone monopoly breakup in the US. Landlines in the US were good, because Ma Bell was smashed up, and thus we had a lot of competition and investment in the landline market. Conversely, landlines were the province of slower-moving national telecoms in Europe. As such, when cell phones came a long, there was much, much more consumer interest in Europe than in the US, so the Euro mobile system was, for a while, about a decade ahead of the Americans.
The current Vodafone internet/cable/telephone package in our house with 250 Mbit download speed costs less than €60/month. Our mobile plan for two phones with combined 26 GB data usage is €50/month.
I travel fairly frequently to Europe and when I'm there I try to rent an apartment and more or less live on the economy, shop at street markets, cook my own food, etc. Spend way less every time than I would if I were living back here stateside. A couple of bags of groceries that would cost me $100 here is like €60 in Germany or Austria.
Also, food tastes better in Europe. They value flavor over transportability and shelf-life.
I didn't think France and Germany would be cheaper than here.
How could that be with their high taxes, including a carbon tax, that support free health care and other "socialist" policies?
There must be some mistake . . . Milton Friedman could NOT possibly have been wrong!
Hmmm... How do I look at other countries? What WB dataset(s) did you use to make the chart.
Good thing I can settle in India with no bureaucratic hassle.
Afghanistan, not so much.
This is an endlessly complex topic. Your results may vary. Another version with pretty understandable explanations:
https://www.worlddata.info/cost-of-living.php
Notice the Purchasing Power Index.
The intro talks about consumer goods but then mentions apartments so housing must be included. Then there's location location - a house in my sister's Van Nuys (downmarket San Fernando Valley, lots of Mexicans) location or mine (Brooklyn an hour from Manhattan, mostly immigrants) is around $1M. Where I grew up in a suburb of Buffalo it would be $200K.
If for example you have a few kids and they get into college then the lower rating of say Germany vs the US might radically turn around for you.
Paris is less expensive to visit than New York, simply because hotel prices are lower (except possible at the very top of the range). The Metro is less than MTA. And the rest of France (except for very high-end tourist destinations in high season) is much cheaper than Paris. Food isn't noticeably more expensive, and the quality if you shop local markets is much higher. However, outside of major cities you need a car to get around.
Not on the graph is Thailand, which I've heard is a cheap place for American expats.
The thing about living somewhere cheaply is that you need community to live anywhere longterm. I definitely would avoid the villa with pool in Afghanistan.
why is there not a single African country in the graph?
No South American countries either. It does not purport to be a comprehensive listing.
I'm 100% certain this is older data, maybe from 2020 or 2021.
Japan is not -10%. The Yen is now hovering around 155¥ to $1 US which is roughly speaking 50% higher than 2020.
In the periphery of Japan's major cities, rents for homes are below USD $500. In the small towns across Japan, rent is less than $200.
There are so many different reasons as to why the US is so expensive. But I'm 75% certain the convicted Trump is going to make sure the US will suddenly drop this year. Recall, his voters want deflation.
I agree with the above. I’ve spent a significant portion of my life in Japan and visit often. At the current exchange rate, Japan is way cheaper than the US, at least a third, if you live anything like a Japanese rather than a bloated ex-pat.
As Yogi Berra once said, "Nobody goes to that restaurant anymore. It's too crowded."
It is certainly not some mysterious force that causes the most desirable places to live to be the most expensive. The same is true within the US.
I've spent significant time in both Taiwan and China. It doesn't seem remotely possible that the latter is more expensive. I pay five bucks for a haircut in Beijing, and that's the 2nd or 3rd most expensive city in the whole country. A perfectly delicious if basic restaurant meal is maybe $4—a fancy(ish) meal maybe 15-20. A dollar's worth of subway fare will take you clear across this vast metropolis.And so on. Taiwan definitely isn't that cheap.