Nov. 5 – The just published China Briefing issue, The Asia Comparator, has resulted in an explosion of downloads for that magazine (well, it is free!). However, it is obvious that the interest in the subject is huge. If you haven’t seen it, a copy can be downloaded on a complimentary basis (you’ll need to subscribe but it only takes a minute).
In the issue, we compare thirteen regional Asian cities using New York City as a benchmark for cost comparisons, salaries and purchase prices. The Asian cities featured are Bangkok, Beijing, Delhi, Hanoi, Hong Kong, Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, Manila, Mumbai, Shanghai, Seoul, Singapore and Taipei. The costs associated with living and working in these cities are then stacked up against New York – often with surprising results. For example, it costs more in Beijing to buy electrical products than it does in Manhattan and purchasing a car in Shanghai is double that of Seoul. There are reasons for this, which we also discuss in the issue.
We’d like to invite our readers to also contribute and tell us your experiences with prices and costs across Asia. For example, I just found out that the price of making a mobile phone call in India is half of that in China. I suspect that’s to do with two factors: true competition in India versus China’s state run entities; and the price sensitivity aspect. We’d love to hear from you, and if we can generate a good amount of feedback we’ll give it to our analysts and see what they can come up with in terms of explanations.
Many thanks!
Chris Devonshire-Ellis
A beer at “Expat prices” in Shanghai is nearly 60 percent more expensive than a beer at “Expat prices” in Bangkok.
How did I know we’d probably start with beer? A can of Kingfisher from my hotel mini bar in Mumbai is Rs125 which is just under USD3. Kingfisher is a pretty good beer. That’s about the same as in a reasonable quality bar. Maybe if we can price things in USD it’ll make it easier to compare.