The capital of Angola has overtaken Hong Kong to become the costliest city or territory in the world for expats, Mercer’s annual survey said yesterday.
Dethroned last year by Hong Kong, Luanda regained the dubious honor despite the depreciation of the Angolan kwanza against the US dollar, according to the survey.
While Hong Kong is bounced back down to second place it remains the most expensive Asian territory or city “because of its currency’s link to the [US] dollar, a factor which makes local housing more expensive,” the report said.
This year Tokyo completes the podium, moving up from last year’s fifth place because of the yen’s appreciation and “the dynamism of the housing market” in Japan, according to the report.
The survey compares the cost of more than 200 items in more than 200 cities and territories, including housing, food, transport and entertainment.
It takes New York — in ninth place this year — as its base for comparison and measures currency movements against the US dollar.
The study is closely followed by governments and international businesses which take the rankings into account when they calculate the costs of sending their employees abroad.
Some Russian cities lept up the table in the new survey, with Moscow reaching 14th place from 53rd last year and Saint Petersburg leaping to 36th from 116th “under the twin effects of the rise in the ruble and the cost of goods and services,” the report said.
Main cities in Australia, Brazil and India also marched up the expat costs list.
A lot of European cities were on the way down, particularly in Britain due to the weakness of the British pound. Paris, Vienna and Rome also became less expensive for the expat purse.
At the bottom of the table were Skopje, Bishkek and Tunis.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained