21st January, 2004

It takes workers in Nairobi, Kenya, three hours to earn enough money to pay for a Big Mac compared with 19 minutes in Sydney.

A new report from Swiss financial services company UBS compares purchasing power around the world. It has found that the Norwegian city of Oslo is the most expensive of the 70 surveyed cities in terms of the cost of living followed by Hong Kong, Tokyo, New York and Zurich.

It also found that a basket of 114 goods and services was cheapest in Mumbai in India, Buenos Aires in Argentina and the Eastern European cities of Kiev, Bucharest and Sofia where costs were around a third of those in Zurich.

Not surprisingly, these cities also boasted among the lowest wage levels with hourly pay in Mumbai, Karachi in Pakistan, Nairobi and Kiev only 10 to 15 per cent of the global average wage of $US7 per hour.

The highest wage levels were found in the Swiss cities of Zurich and Basel, Copenhagen in Denmark and Oslo in Norway. Wage levels in Sydney were only 40 per cent of those in Zurich.

Meanwhile figures comparing the amount of time worked to buy a Big Mac shows it takes a person living in Nairobi 185 minutes of work to do so, compared with 19 minutes in Sydney, and 10 minutes in Los Angeles.

- David Adams