According to the newly released PWC Cities of Opportunity Study, Sydney wins second price for what we all know it deserves first prize for: being the most expensive city in the world.
The most difficult—and continually challenging—aspect of preparing Cities of Opportunity every year is ensuring that its analysis is not only based on reliable and credible data, but on a critical evaluation of those data. In today’s world of international organizations of the highest integrity offering easy access to their databanks (from the IMF and World Bank to the OECD and World Economic Forum), gathering information is, in fact, the easiest part of our job. The hard part is assessing that information. The question always remains: Does the analysis make sense. Upon examining last year’s results in this indicator in preparation for this year’s report, we felt that they had inadvertently tilted the West. The issue wasn’t that they showed the five lowest-cost cities in our rankings coming from North America (followed by Berlin and Sydney), while seven out of the 10 highest-cost cities were in the developing world. What seems counterintuitive isn’t necessarily so. Our cost indicator, after all, measures costs for a businessperson living in our cities—which is to say, the cost of a transnational, middle-class way of life.
The study compares such costs as rent, broadband and other essentials for the global jet-set:
But given it’s designed to capture the kind of pricing a lonely, trans-national businessperson is subject too, the absence of a comparative pricing for evening’s entertainment is surely the only reason for Sydney’s ignominious second place!
