Where in the world are the least expensive large cities to live in?
The large cities outside the US with the lowest cost of living for low income families are all in the developing world, as you might expect. They are Asuncion in Paraguay, Harare in Zimbabwe, Buenos Aires in Argentina, Manila in the Philippines, and Karachi in Pakistan. Living in Asuncion, which is the cheapest of all the major cities included in the statistics, is less than half as expensive as living in New York. Generally speaking, the cheapest cities to live in are in south Asia and South America, and the most expensive are in Europe and the Far East, but within countries there can be a wide fluctuation – the cost of living for low income families is much lower in Leipzig, Germany, than it is in Frankfurt. How is the low cost of living measured? The survey is carried out by a company called Mercer Human Resource Consulting, and covers 144 cities across six continents and measures the comparative cost of over 200 items in each location, including housing, transport, food, clothing,
