An annual ranking of the world’s most expensive cities for expats was released on Tuesday by Mercer, a consultancy. It uses New York as the base city and the US dollar as the base currency for its comparisons.
Mercer looked at over 200 cities around the world, and compared them and their currencies to these two reference points. The list was then worked out by looking at the costs of things that expats in these cities typically spend their money on (this often differs from the bulk of local residents' spending habits in cities with big income inequality or safety problems).