Numbeo.com now compares pollution, crime, health care and traffic by city

As you might know, Numbeo.com started as cost of living and property prices comparison website, using entries from visitors (contributors).

But for living in certain city many other things might be important like how would you feel living over there, culture shock, education systems, schools, crime rate, pollution, health care system, transportation, housing options, jobs availability...

To help users obtain more information about living in a certain city,
Numbeo.com will now use contributions from users to measure pollution, crime, health care and traffic by city.

Thank you to all who contributed with data at Numbeo.com - without you, maybe the website would have great software however it would not be useful.

More features coming soon at Numbeo.com

Top 20 Most Expensive Cities in The World (Mid 2011)

Based on 38 goods and services, Numbeo.com cost of living survey for mid 2011 were conducted by more than 13990 independent contributors who entered more than 145600 prices. The most expensive cities (excluding rent) are Stavanger and Oslo in Norway, followed by Zurich and Basel in Switzerland.


In Numbeo's survey, New York is used as the base city for the index and scores 100 points, all cities are compared against New York and currency movements are measured against US Dollar and EURO. Sydney (Australia) scores 131.47 points and is nearly three times as costly
as Manila (Philippines) with 46.72 points.

In the mid of 2011, the most expensive cities (excluding rent) are :
- Stavanger, Norway (CPI 186.74)
- Oslo, Norway (166.9)
- Zurich, Switzerland (164)
- Basel, Switzerland (158.95)
- Geneva, Switzerland (154.78)
- Lausanne, Switzerland (153.1)
- Perth, Australia (146.58)
- Lucerne, Switzerland (144.92)
- Copenhagen, Denmark (141.58)
- Monaco, Monaco (138.54)
- Bergen, Norway (137.9)
- Rotterdam, Netherlands (136)
- Sydney, Australia (131.47)
- Dublin, Ireland (129.88)
- Lugano, Switzerland (129.75)
- Nice, France (129.55)
- Tokyo, Japan (127.9)
- Amsterdam, Netherlands (126.81)
- Stockholm, Sweden (125.61)
- Brisbane, Australia (125.14)

For complete current rankings (updated biweekly) please visit Numbeo's http://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/rankings_current.jsp.

Numbeo.com in the media / news

During more than two years of being online, Numbeo.com managed to bring attention of more than 2 million of visitors and was covered in many international newspapers and magazines.

Forbes said "Numbeo.com has relative country-by-country breakouts for rent, groceries and restaurants."

ABC (in Spanish) said : "and aroused by the curiosity of the bloggers for yesterday, Numbeo, a comparator cost of living between two countries, is the reference for averages price of some goods and services such as housing, public transportation or restaurants. "

Downloadsquad brought an article : "Comment followup: Numbeo is another (better) cost of living calculator"

Redferret magazine : "Numbeo, created by ex-Google engineer Mladen Adamovic, is an ultra cool data site which lets you compare the cost of living in your city with other cities around the country and the world."

Numbeo was covered in most major medias in Serbia (including B92 and Blic) and Romania (including Romania Libera, Gandul.info, Dailybusiness.ro, Informazia zilei, Libertatea, ...).

Numbeo was also in Bulgarian magazine Expert.bg, Spanish magazine Internetizado, German magazine "Lateinamerika Reisemagazin", Aministradores magazine in Brazil, etc.

The partial list with links is available at
http://www.numbeo.com/common/in_the_news.jsp

Numbeo's 2011 Cost of Living Index Highlights

Based on 38 goods and services, Numbeo.com cost of living survey for 2011 were conducted by 6628 independent contributors. The most expensive cities (excluding rent) are Oslo and Stavanger in Norway, followed by Zurich and Geneva in Switzerland. The least expensive are Hyderabad, Bangalore and Chennai in India.

In Numbeo's survey, New York is used as the base city for the index and scores 100 points, all cities are compared against New York and currency movements are measured against US Dollar and EURO. Sydney (Australia) scores 113.14 points and is nearly three times as costly as La Paz (Bolivia) with an index score of 39.00.

In the beginning of 2011, most expensive cities (excluding rent) are :
- Oslo, Norway (CPI 149.26)
- Stavanger, Norway (145.65)
- Zurich, Switzerland (143.93)
- Geneva, Switzerland (143.71)
- Bergen, Norway (142.46)
- Basel, Switzerland (141.12)
- Lausanne, Switzerland (136.41)
- Lucerne, Switzerland (133.04)
- Perth, Australia (130.15)
- Copenhagen, Denmark (123.87)

The least expensive cities in 2011 are Indian cities : Coimbatore, Pune, Chennai, Mumbai and Hyderabad, followed by Islamabad and Karachi in Pakistan.

Rent is most expensive in New York , followed by San Francisco (USA), Abu Dhabi (United Arab Emirates) and Lucerne (Switzerland).

Cities with the lowest rent are Changchun (China) and Karachi (Pakistan).

On country level the most expensive countries in 2011 are Norway, Switzerland, Denmark, Belgium, Australia, Ireland and Netherlands.

The least expensive countries in 2011 are India, Pakistan, Bolivia, Vietnam, Philippines, Thailand, and Macedonia.

For complete rankings please visit http://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/rankings.jsp

Options for Economy Trends in 2011

The Economist magazine brought an interesting article titled with : “Betting big on bonds“ – an economist advises investors to expect deflation” http://www.economist.com/node/17853304,

A paragraph which provokes thinking: “Debt ratios, relative to GDP, are so high that it seems unlikely that most developed economies can grow their way out of the mess. That leaves the unappealing options of default, Japanese-style stagnation or rapid inflation to erode the real value of the debt burden.”

Debt of developed countries looks bad. If investors stop covering that debt, the country has an option to default. Usually better option is inflationary mechanism– printing money to cover debt. If the inflation rate is higher than interest rate of government bonds, it is not in favor of investors to buy government bonds. Some investors might still buy government bonds even if interest rate is below inflation since it is considered as low risk investment. They do so to diversify their portfolios.

At the other way, modern global economy is highly competitive which by itself deflatory process. If you can produce a good or make service cheaper, most likely you’ll sell much better than competitors. It was obvious in expansion of big supermarkets (so called hypermarkets). They provided goods cheaper than competitors. Modern economy is deflatory – market wants cheaper goods.

So the market does deflatory mechanism and government does inflatory mechanism.

So which is most likely future? Inflation? Deflation?

Possibilities:

Defaults of governments and financial institution – this will most likely happen unless government is printing money, since printing money is better for a country than default, countries will print money

Japanese style stagnation –real estate, stock and general market deflatory mechanism combined with no government default, slow money printing machine and investors preferring government bonds in spite of insane debt to GDP ratio

Rapid inflation - sounds like a real possibilities unless certain types of assets are over valuated.

If certain types of assets are over valuated as housing, it brings unprofitability to many financial and insurance institutions and in general brings stock value down. In the other way, price of commodities goes up due to money printing mechanism and overvaluation of other assets… isn’t it what is happening now? Isn’t the price of housing going down and the price of commodities going up? Isn’t the price of stocks bind to housing going down as well? Which trends do you predict in 2011?