Taipei has been named the 61st most expensive city in the world for expatriates this year, up from 62nd last year, according to this year’s Cost of Living Survey released on Thursday by Mercer, a leading firm of financial analysts.
Mercer put Luanda, the capital of oil-rich Angola, at the top of its annual expat cost-of-living survey for the second year in a row, followed by N’Djamena in Chad.
European and Asian cities also continued to dominate as the costliest cities, with Hong Kong in third place, followed by Singapore.
Zurich, Switzerland, jumped three places to fifth, followed by Geneva, Switzerland, in sixth.
Tokyo dropped four spots to rank seventh.
Other cities appearing in the top 10 of Mercer’s costliest cities for expatriates are Bern, Switzerland, Moscow and Shanghai.
Four of the top 10 cities in this year’s ranking are in Asia. The most expensive, Hong Kong, jumped three places from last year. Singapore is the next most expensive city in the region, gaining one position from last year, followed by Tokyo, which dropped four places this year. Jumping four spots since last year, Shanghai is followed by Beijing (11), Seoul (14) and Shenzhen, China (17).
Cities in the US have climbed in the rankings due to the relative stability of the US dollar against other major currencies, in addition to significant drops for cities in other regions.
A rise in the rental accommodation market pushed New York up eight places to 16th, the highest-ranked city in the region.
Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city and financial hub, ranked No. 211 and is the world’s least expensive city for expatriates.
Mercer’s survey is designed to help multinational companies and governments determine compensation allowances for their expatriate employees. New York is used as the base city and all cities are compared against it. Currency movements are measured against the US dollar.
The survey covers 211 cities across five continents and measures the comparative cost of more than 200 items in each location, including housing, transportation, food, clothing, household goods and entertainment.
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read: