Monday, December 15, 2008

living it up

the inimitable people's daily (the communist party paper) put up another hard hitting news story friday on its english language web site. surprisingly, this time the paper itself didn't do anything confusingly hilarious; it's the subject of the story itself that deserves posting here. beijing more expensive than hong kong, shanghai and singapore? it seems like eca international spent a bit too much time handing out their survey in shunyi and central park:*

Cost of living for foreigners in Beijing continues to rise
by People's Daily Online, December 12, 2008

According to Shanghai Morning Post, a survey carried out by the ECA International, the world’s largest human resources consulting firm showed that Tokyo is still the city with the highest cost of living for foreigners in Asia. While Beijing, by beating Hong Kong for the first time, became the city that is most expensive for foreigners in China.

According to the ECA report, Beijing ranks to 31st this year, while Shanghai is the 35th. Hong Kong climbs to 33rd from its previous position of 88th.

The appreciation of RMB and inflation helped raise the cost of living in Chinese cities, Beijing in particular. The survey shows that cost of living for a foreigner in Beijing is 15% higher than that of Singapore, which ranks 95th this year.

Luanda, the capital of the oil-rich African country of Angola, ranks number one this year. Tokyo follows Luanda closely in second place. Russia’s capital replaces the Norwegian capital Oslo to be the European city with the highest cost of living for foreigners.
granted, eca does seem to have some sophisticated indices and caveats that get lost in the people's-daily-english-reports-shanghai-morning-post-publishing-survey-results procedures. but i'm just glad i'm not living in luanda, for a variety of reasons.

*shunyi is the home of the central villa district, aka american suburbia in beijing, and central park is a luxury apartment complex in the cbd.

3 comments:

Jeremy said...

hey man, glad to see you're still alive. i'm prolly going to go to china in march for a little bit -- will most likely spend majority of time in taiwan, though. you going to be around?

Matthew said...

Got a similar article here in Shenzhen about foreign cost of living. I think the criteria is the cost of cheese and coffee. And they probably throw in long-distance taxi rides rather than public transportation.

Ben said...

thing with starbucks is it costs the same everywhere. cheese might be a good one, though the price is coming down since everybody's terrified of anything dairy. i'm sure beijing would probably lose out on taxi rides: everything is so far away from everything else.