NZ zooms up world cost-of-living scale [Cost of living in world's cities]
5:00AM Thursday July 24, 2008
By Brooke Donovan
Rising costs of housing, rent and food have catapulted New Zealand's biggest cities up a global cost of living ranking.
Mercer's 2008 Cost of Living Survey has Auckland in 78th place and Wellington 93rd, up 21 and 18 places respectively.
But Kiwis struggling with the credit crunch can still count themselves lucky - at least they don't live in Moscow, Tokyo or London.
Auckland ranked the same as San Francisco and just above Beirut in Lebanon, and Casablanca in Morocco.
Wellington came in fractionally more expensive than Kuwait City and Leipzig in Germany, and a touch less than Santiago in Chile.
And the commonly held belief that Australia is cheaper was blown out of the water, with Sydney in 15th place, Melbourne 36th, Perth 53rd and Brisbane 57th.
Targeted at multinational companies that send employees around the world to work, the survey used New York as its base city for the purposes of comparison.
The most expensive place to live was Moscow, followed by Tokyo and London. Asian and European cities rounded out the top 10.
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