This anecdotally back ups what I was seeing when I visited the US.
Groceries and food (in general) was surprisingly more expensive in New Hampshire and Vermont than Calgary where I live (which is not a low COL area in Canada). I cannot understand how American fruit costs more in the US than they did back home (when including the exchange rate). I was not visiting a premium grocery store (it was a Price Chopper near a Tesla Charger near a small town in NH.)
This generally surprised me because the Canadian "online left" is organizing protests about the cost of food, while I don't see anything similar in the US.
> Groceries and food (in general) was surprisingly more expensive in New Hampshire and Vermont than Calgary
That doesn't seem that surprising? Where is the produce coming from? Typically California or Mexico. I could imagine the transport costs are lower to Calgary than Vermont.
It also depends on what stores - comparing mid-market to mid-market. Whole Foods in the US is way more expensive than Superstore in Canada.
And it also depends on the state. I almost always (there are exceptions) found US prices (New England, Midwest, and West Coast) to be the same or lower than Canada. Though the NE was the highest of all 3.
I doubt much food is coming from CA or Mexico to northeastern states like Vermont and New Hampshire. More like the Midwest, southeast, and even the northeast itself has plenty of agriculture to keep the north east fed, what comes from CA would be things like walnuts, oranges, and grapes, nice for sure but kind of niche. Mexico would be similar, and you can’t compete with the Midwest on corn (Mexico’s most popular crop).
Incidentally, I found food prices in LA to be really cheap. Like, incredibly so given that it was supposed to be HCOL. Proximity to Mexico sure helps. Seattle in comparison is much more expensive, and variety isn’t as great.
Purchasing power can be misleading in countries with a top-heavy income distribution. Because cost of living calculations include everyday expenses but exclude most luxuries, average costs are close to what the typical consumer pays. But if the income distribution is skewed enough, average salaries can be much higher than what the typical consumer earns.
The US also differs wildly in cost of living on a state-by-state, city-by-city basis. Even the suburbs of big cities can have a substantially cheaper cost of living.
You're going to have a much different picture of this if you compare San Francisco and Montgomery, Alabama.
While you're right that median is more useful than mean in this case, it doesn't address the specific issue jltsiren raised, that this kind of statistics tends to exclude luxury goods.
This seems reasonable, as luxury is not related to the cost of 'living'. However doing so they include more-than-necessary-to-live earnings but excludes more-than-necessary-to-live costs.
In other words, if you include Bruce Wayne's income, you should include batmobiles, too!
Living in France, i'm pretty surprised they manage to find a "cost of living index" being _lower_ now than in 2018.
Sure, things have recessed from the highs of 2022 / 2023, but the idea of a "groceries index" that does not reflect how is has changed to, ahem, shop for groceries is weird.
It's baselined against New York, so you can be more expensive, but not have had the cost of living grow faster than NYC.
This makes it alright for comparing between countries in a single year, but I'm not sure exactly what you get out of comparing the same country within a year.
When sorting by Rent Index, the US looks like a massive outlier at
45. Everywhere else over 40 is either a tiny island nation/territory or famously idiosyncratic (Switzerland, Iceland, UAE). The other Anglosphere giants, Canada and Australia, come in very high as well at 36.
I would have expected the most desirable Western European nations to lead, but most of those are in the 20's. Those nations tend to have more regulation and much less space to develop, yet they've managed to keep their rents meaningfully lower despite having a comparable cost of living overall.
> Rent Index: This index estimates the prices of renting apartments in a city compared to New York City. If the Rent Index is 80, it suggests that the average rental prices in that city are approximately 20% lower than those in New York City.
I think just by country messes up some of the measures for some countries and cities. I paid half of £720 to rent a former family home in Nottingham while a friend paid over £1000 in Nottingham.
Not my experience but I think Amsterdam also has extremely high rents but I'm not sure how it compares to the rest of the Netherlands.
The Netherlands has a segmented rental market. The social/rent controlled sector has a price ceiling of €880/month and is only accessible with annual income below €48k/€53k (single/multi-person household). These norms apply nation wide, but as demand / free market prices in the large cities like Amsterdam is much higher than elsewhere in the country, waiting times for social rent there is around 15 years (vs maybe 3 to 5 outside the big cities). Free market rents (anything over €880/month) in Amsterdam is probably around €1500 for a 1br or €2500-€3500 for a 3br. Around 3/4 of the total rental housing stock is social/rent-controlled units. It can be pretty nice if you manage to get one, but it's almost inaccessible to newcomers/outsiders due to the income caps and waiting times. Which is pretty much the expected outcome for price control affordability policies.
I'm surprised by how much the US has changed. I used to find it one of the cheapest places in the developed world and if you set the date thing on the map to 2014 it shows it like that. I'm not quite sure why it's changed. My guess would be investment flows into the big tech stocks like Apple, MSFT and Nvidia have pushed the currency up. Also oil - the US used to import a lot and is now the world's largest producer.
IMO depending on what question you're looking to answer using this page, typically some variant of "how expensive is my country relative to others", it would probably be useful to check out the purchasing power adjusted index (also present on the page)
Japan has always been a value. I don't understand why folks think it is expensive. Food is cheap, accommodations aren't expensive, transportation is affordable. The most expensive thing is airfare from the USA.
I believe that they never fully recovered after Covid and tourism never bounced back. The YEN has also taken a beating so you can get more for your USD.
>I believe that they never fully recovered after Covid and tourism never bounced back.
Tourism bounced back as soon as they opened the borders. The 2023 numbers were at 2016/2017 level despite them not opening their borders until late 2022 (meaning lower ski-season numbers), and removing covid checks in April 2023.
Feb 2024 was reported as having 7% more tourists than Feb 2019 (2019 having peak tourism numbers).
Japan was seen as expensive when I first moved there; my rent there was certainly higher than it would have been in Canada at the time (Circa 2008).
Also, it's hard to directly compare stuff on shelves to what we have here. For example, Japanese peaches are much more expensive than Ontario peaches - but they are also incomparably better. However, if you only look at the price on the label, you would be rightfully shocked at the price difference.
Japan is mostly cheap, but on our trip my wife accidentally bought some grapes at a normal grocery store (she wasn’t converting prices in her head). I think it was $20 for a pound.
You should carefully check the price tag when you want to bug fruits and vegetables in Japan, especially those are produced in Japan. The Japan Agricultural Cooperation has a very long history in controlling the price of the local products. The imports usually cost less than domestically grown equivalents.
Ah, my in-laws are in Yamanashi and I will never forget when they took me to the vineyard and I was randomly shocked to find out how much the grapes cost..
Japan has approximately the same local price level now that they had in the early 1990s. One USD also buys approximately the same number of Yen as it did in the early 1990s. But the USD had quite a lot inflation in the meantime.
Ie Japan has gotten a lot cheaper comparatively. It used to be a lot more expensive.
That’s not the exchange rate, but the relative prices. Exchange rate in Argentina right now is 1000 pesos to 1 usd.
In 2021 it was between 200-300 or so to 1, and it’s almost twice as expensive today as it was in 2021.
Eastern Europe is where it is at. Ukraine is super cheap and a really beautiful place, requires a little work to get there but not to bad. Hotels are cheap and really good food and just awesome. Planning to go again this summer.
Getting there wasn't too difficult, there is an overnight train from Prague that takes you to the border where you switch trains to go to Lviv or onward. You can also take a train from anywhere in Poland to the border. Buses are a good option too. Prices were very affordable, $250 for an entire month at an AirBnB in the heart of Old Town Lviv. Had Internet, washing machine, stove, etc, nice place. Then went on to Kyiv for a few weeks, absolutely amazing. My new favorite city in Europe. That was $28 a night at Hotel Ukraine. Everything was affordable and they accept credit cards/mobile payments etc everywhere. Got a sim from Kyiv Star Mobile for like $4 USD with 20 gig data and it worked everywhere, even in Germany, Poland and Czech Republic.
There were air raid alerts when I was there and missile/rocket attacks but they do a good job protecting everyone. All in all it was a awesome time, am definitely going back this summer. It's a wonderful and very resilient country with beautiful people, once you visit you understand why they are fighting so hard to preserve it. The war has cost them dearly and it is sobering to see all the memorials dedicated to their dead Heroes.
I am glad to have gone and spend time and money there to support them. Everyone I met was incredibly grateful that I had come as a visitor, it's important to show that they are not alone. It felt like I was part of an incredibly important moment in History in their fight for survival. I encourage everyone to go and support them and their economy in some way.
Their cities are regularly hit by antiship missiles (russians are evil) and Iranian made/copied drones. They don't care about you and will kill you no matter what your passport is from.
has anyone done a simple merging of the Cost of living and quality of living to get the top 10 countries with the lowest cost of living but relatively highest quality of living?
You can of course use alternative calculations / weights, but without a principled way to do so, you can choose weights to come up with pretty much any outcome that you like.
Also worth mentioning that the QoL index considers "climate index" which is almost meaningless, and apparently doesn't account for factors like "suffers from tropical cyclones".
What people always get wrong about inflation statistics is that they’re really only meaningful when talking about the whole country. If you think CPI is wrong, well, it’s wrong for you. It’s wrong for every individual. But it’s right when you average everyone out.
For example, let’s say you have a fixed rate mortgage on the home you own and live in. If house prices skyrocket because supply is restricted, that inflation doesn’t affect you. Or let’s say you spend $200 per month on food out of a total budget of $4000. If food prices go up uniformly 20%, but nothing else changes for all the other stuff you buy (ie, you’re paying $40 more per month than you were before), you’re effective inflation rate is 1%.
The relative ranking of the US has changed drastically within the past decade. I wonder why. It seems like many factors that we blame for rising costs - inflation, supply-chain issues - would affect other countries as well.
From my experience it's become relatively more expensive than other countries even if every country has experienced inflation to a small or large extent.
The joke used to be how expensive Switzerland was...now I am looking at prices in Zurich for food, drinks, hotels and it's no different than what you'd pay in a big city in the US, maybe less.
I don’t agree. I live in the Bay Area and eating out is noticeably more expensive in Zurich than here. I find that you’re not going to get away for less than 60-70 francs for dinner for two pretty much anywhere in Zurich. Sure, there are many places you can pay that much in the bay, but you can also eat for much cheaper. Even outside the cities it’s insane. We went to a regular looking Indian restaurant 40km outside of Basel and it was 35 francs a plate. We thought the portions were going to be huge but no, maybe 200 grams of curry and a small cup of rice. Eye popping.
Groceries are about the same with the exception of beef which literally seems like it’s 2-3x us prices.
I think rent in Switzerland is way cheaper both in absolute terms and the value you get for your money. The housing stock is much better quality than the Bay Area. Having good public transit also makes it easier to live in a wider variety of places too.
in what world is 60-70 francs for dinner eg under $80 or $40pp eye-popping for dinner especially when you add tax and tip to any menu price in the US?
and you can't compare in-n-out to a sit down place.
an average casual ramen place is like $22 a bowl now here. add an egg (yes, they don't include it anymore) and it's $25. then add one drink or something and you're at $30. Then tax is $33 and tip is another $6-7. That's $40 for a ramen and a drink.
These are two restaurants in some of the most expensive real estate and highest income area in California if not the whole US. Meanwhile the Indian place was as I said, 40km outside Basel (the town was amusingly called Frick).
(by the way I checked Ramen Nagi, also in Palo Alto and has lines out the door every day. Regular bowl is 15.25, an egg is 2.75. So I think your baseline is a bit high.)
You intentionally picked fast casual places that are akin to a Chipotle. I'm talking about a sit down place with service.
I'm in San Francisco. Not sure if you've been to a sit down place recently but trying to argue a sit down meal is $25pp inclusive of tax and tip is ridiculous.
Coconuts and Orens are full service sit down restaurants. They may not be super fancy byt you do not order from a counter like Chipotle. Ramen Nagi is not strictly full service because the lines are so long - the server comes out and hands you a order card to expedite the process. But there are roving waitstaff that handle appetizers and drinks. I think you settle the check at the counter.
I mean, sure, if you go to trendy restaurant of the week it's going to be super expensive. But there are plenty of places you can eat out in SF for ~$15 a person out the door. I don't feel like that's true in Zurich.
In fact, writing this comment made me remember when I went to Hiltl Sihlpost. That's definitely not a full service restaurant, but it was 30 francs for a plate of entirely vegetarian food! Reflecting more, I think what's missing in Zurich is the equivalent of low end Bay Area restaurants.
In 2007 before I left Lausanne, a Big Mac meal, was 10.5 CHF, that was maybe $8, this was before CHF hit parity with USD. Now it is 16 CHF, and CHF is now 10% more dear than USD, so I would say it has risen quite a bit? Even if not as much as a Big Mac meal did in the states (from I think $5 to $13).
A better indicator would be Kebob prices, but I just don’t remember those.
my point wasn't that a Big Mac meal in Switzerland hasn't risen since 2007 or wahtever. My point was at that time an American in Switzerland would have thought it was relatively much more expensive than a Big Mac meal here. Now it's similar.
16CHF is like $17.60 now. That is still more expensive than the states, although I guess $13 in Seattle + tax works out to $14.30.
Whatever, for what I made in Switzerland, it didn't seem like a big deal, and you can live pretty well in Swiss with very deterministic costs, whereas in the states, tax and tips sneak up on you.
If you just purchase some USD on the open market when you need them, and then immediately spend them, you don't really care about what happens to the long running price level of the USD.
If you artificially narrow the circumstances like that sure.
In practice that’s often not the case. Long term contracts, futures, FDI commitments, etc is all USD bound over time.
Hell even the shtty VPS I bought from Eastern Europe is a recurring fixed USD per year so they’re carrying the US inflation effect as margin squeeze (and I fully expect them to renege on that at some point)
being from a country on the bottom side of the list living on one from the top, it seems to roughly add up from my experience. although it is more accurate for the more expensive parts of each country.
when living in a cheaper country to live compared to a more expensive one, there is a very different split between rent and other expense in terms of having a comparable standard of living.
My experience last year was the USA felt more expensive, starting with the basics like the cheapest t-shirts from Wallmart (vs kmart), beers from a local bottleshop (I was always told AU got the highest alcohol tax so I was a bit surprised) and food places with tax+tips felt more expensive as well.
I'm from Australia and spent five weeks travelling in the US earlier this year. It felt more expensive than any previous trip, and also relative to Australia. We had grocery runs where I walked away wondering how a significant portion of the population there could afford to eat decent food. Tipping is always rising as well, so to eat out you're then paying a larger premium on an already higher number.
One example I can remember, comparing a pretty default Thai place in the US to one of the more premium Thai restaurants here in Adelaide:
AU: Pad Thai chicken AU$23, Kao Pad chicken AU$19.
US: Pad Thai chicken + tax and tip AU$32, house fried rice AU$32.
Yes, there's cheaper and more expensive, but that was a 'special occasion' restaurant versus a place we just stopped in adjacent a Walmart carpark.
Groceries and food (in general) was surprisingly more expensive in New Hampshire and Vermont than Calgary where I live (which is not a low COL area in Canada). I cannot understand how American fruit costs more in the US than they did back home (when including the exchange rate). I was not visiting a premium grocery store (it was a Price Chopper near a Tesla Charger near a small town in NH.)
This generally surprised me because the Canadian "online left" is organizing protests about the cost of food, while I don't see anything similar in the US.