Global pay scale - where's argentina?

[notebook.fix]

This could be an interesting chart...

Where are you on the global pay scale?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17543356

 

[expatinowncountry]

What is relevant is how much you are been paid with respect to the average person in the country. I rather make $100K in China than $150K in Luxembourg.

 

[surfing]

It seems to me that the cost of living numbers for Argentina they have plugged in to that database are seriously flawed (not surprising since there is really no accurate official data available) so I would take in results with a grain of salt.

 

[trennod]

What is relevant is how much you are been paid with respect to the average person in the country. I rather make $100K in China than $150K in Luxembourg.

I think whats more relevant is what your being paid in consideration to the cost of living in your particular country. However, I think what is also relevant is the given strength of the currency in which your earning that income relative to other currencies (given you may want to travel, purchase things outside the country etc).

 

[John.St]

I think whats more relevant is what your being paid in consideration to the cost of living in your particular country. However, I think what is also relevant is the given strength of the currency in which your earning that income relative to other currencies (given you may want to travel, purchase things outside the country etc).

Precisely.

Charles Dickens' Mr. Micawber said it: "Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery."

In the Sovjet Union one rubel had a nominal value of US$ 1.10, but if a Russian traveled to the west, the exchange rate was 9-10 cents.

 

[jimdepalermo]

Here's some related data I've been tracking for some years now.

The UBS Bank (Switzerland) regularly updates a study of prices and earnings in major cities around the world. You can see the details at http://www.ubs.com/global/en/wealth_management/wealth_management_research/prices_earnings.html

The methodology for the Prices, or cost-of-living, part of the study starts with a shopping basket of the standard goods and services consumed by a middle-class household in Western Europe. They price each item at real stores in a specific city to create a local cost-of-living number for the specific city. An alternate measure includes housing cost (rent). The numbers are then converted to US dollars at the current rate and indexed so that the cost of the basket in New York City is 100. By this method all other cities' costs are presented as a percentage of costs in New York. Obviously, the exchange rate of the dollar has a major impact on the index.

There is similar data for Earnings that I don't track. As an ex-New Yorker living in Buenos Aires and earning mostly US dollars, the cost side of the study interests me most.

Below is my summary of changes in costs from 2006-2011, during which time Buenos Aires has moved up from the 70th to the 67th most costly city tracked, just after Lima and ahead of Nairobi, Delhi, Kuala Lumpur, Cairo, Manila, and Mumbai.

The latest data is from about a year ago, so the last year's 25% inflation vs. 9% rise in the dollar exchange rate will have a definite effect that's not yet presented. If there were no changes in costs in the other cities, the net inflation should move BsAs costs, including rent, up about 19 places, equal to Warsaw or Budapest.

More recent data should be published around July or August.

Apologies for the fuzzy image.