One only needs to do a Sunday drive around Hong Kong's Peak to see that big firms are paying top dollar to keep their expatriate employees happy and productive. Ranked as the eighth most expensive city out of a pool of 214 cities, Hong Kong maintains its affluent reputation in Mercer's most recent Cost of Living index, alongside Tokyo, Osaka and Singapore.
The index was created by consulting firm Mercer, and is an annual survey designed to be used as a tool to help develop compensation packages for expatriate employees among Mercer's corporate and government clients.
"In the past couple of years, corporate assignments have become truly global, with expatriates and 'global assignees' being transferred all over the world," said a Mercer spokesperson. "Global mobility is still an expensive undertaking for companies and a real understanding of the costs involved in relocating staff to other countries is essential," she added.
To develop the scores, New York has been used as the base city, with each city then given a comparative weighting to New York. The survey weighs over 200 indicators, including the cost of housing, transport, food, clothing, household goods and entertainment. Currency movements that are calculated into the costs are measured against the US dollar. According to Mercer, it is currently the most comprehensive index of its kind in the market.
Globally, Mercer's top 10 and bottom 10 lists looks like this:
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