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Collaborative international cost-of-living index

expatistan.com

11–20 of 84 posts

Re: Collaborative international cost-of-living index

#11
post #9
post #2

This looks very similar to http://www.numbeo.com which was also created in 2009. Is it the same data?

What is more, Numbeo seems to be more exhaustive. Expatistan has only 1 accomodation data point (Monthly rent for 85 m2 (900 Sqft) furnished accommodation in EXPENSIVE area) while Numbeo give me information about different size apartments in and out of city center

Yes, currently we have only one accommodation type.

We started collecting prices for different ones a while ago. We are now reaching the point where we already have enough data to include the new types of housing in the public index.

Re: Collaborative international cost-of-living index

#12

Will data collected be opened for other to use/analyse/exploit?

At the moment I have no plans to open the data completely.

I do sometimes share the data with particular projects or developers on a case-by-case basis. If you are thinking about using the data for something interesting, you can contact me through the website.

Re: Collaborative international cost-of-living index

#15

You're comparing cost of living without taking into account median salaries? I don't think any comparison is complete without some sort of salary survey.

I get this comment a lot. I agree that it makes sense to compare also local salaries to see which city is the cheapest one to live in as an employee.

However, Expatistan is not about finding cheap cities to work in. It's about comparing cost-of-living, independently of your income. Expats are usually not linked to average local salaries in any meaningful way, anyway.

I explain it much better in the website: http://www.expatistan.com/faq#average-salary

Re: Collaborative international cost-of-living index

#16
Once again asking about "expats", which just means "rich immigrant". You could get totally different answers if you were asking for "main immigrant part of $CITY". The survey to collect data even says "Do not enter prices that can only be found .. in [e]specially cheap neighborhoods", which usually means "immigrant".

Re: Collaborative international cost-of-living index

#19
post #12

Will data collected be opened for other to use/analyse/exploit?

At the moment I have no plans to open the data completely. I do sometimes share the data with particular projects or developers on a case-by-case basis. If you are thinking about using the data for something interesting, you can contact me through the website.

Why not open it in a open data spirit to anyone so incentivise curious people can create nice analysis whenever they feel like it?

Re: Collaborative international cost-of-living index

#20

Main economic institutions [1] already maintains databases of consumer goods and services price across countries, but they don't give easy access to the raw data. Glad to see Expatistan filling this gap. [1] International Comparison Program for the Worldbank ( http://icp.worldbank.org/ ), Eurostats ( http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/statistics_explained/index.... )

I looked for it but I don't see any way to get the raw data from it. Can you point it?
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