I know per capita income data is available everywhere but I wonder does anyone do an analysis of per capita income versus cost of living, or amount of discretionary money an average person in a country is left with? I see alot of first world countries with insanely high per capita income of over 30,000 dollars but I do wonder how much discretionary spending they are left with after tax, rent, and stuff? I wasn’t sure where this post should go so I put it in international politics so if the mods finds a better forum please feel free to move it there, thanks.
It’s an interesting topic for me at least.
When I first came to Taiwan daily expenditure was more expensive than in Australia, but with the low level of inflation here, Australia is perhaps 3 times more expensive on a daily basis.
By way of an anecdote:
I went to Jason’s supermarket today in the basement of 101 and bought a chicken rolande with apple and raisin stuffing, mashed potato, and broccoli for 150nt about 6 AUD. There is no possible way you could get that quality in Australia for less than 30 dollars.
That doesn’t really take into account what the cost of living versus per capita is though… I mean like most places in Europe it’s insane but so are their tax and cost of living.
You want to know how much purchasing power individuals have in terms of take home pay versus cost of living.
It’s a good question.
The average disposable income in Taiwan in 2005 was about 860,000nt.
On the expat index Taipei ranks number 48 out of 50 cities, but that’s for expats including expat housing, which can be expensive.
This site gives you the average salary of many jobs and per sector.
worldsalaries.org/taiwan.shtml
There’s no cost of living per capita number, only the cost of living index which measures the relative cost of living in one place versus another, given a standard basket of items such as housing, food, and transportation.
In the link given above on per capita GDP (PPP), with the cost of living equalized, the GDP(PPP) ratio of US to Taiwan is 47,440:30,912, or 1.53:1. This means that in terms of purchasing power, the average American make enough to purchase about one and a half times more stuff than the average Taiwanese.
However, if we look at per capita GDP (nominal), without regard to the cost of living, the GDP(nominal) ratio of US to Taiwan is 47,440:16,988, or 2.79:1. This means that in terms of paper money, the average American makes pretty close to three times more than the average Taiwanese.
However, a 2.79x in paper money earning power has only afforded the average American to buy 1.53x the amount of goods. Thus, we can conclude that the average American cost of living is 2.79/1.53=1.82x that of the average Taiwanese.
Keep in mind that is an average and that for any specific product category (food, housing, brothels), the ratio may be wildly different.
Hence standard deviation being useful in determining stastical evidence. Take for example, the wide variation of cost living between different regions in the United States coupled with variance in prices of goods from the Consumer Price Index (CPI). Taiwan also has variations in cost of living between it’s significantly smaller regions, however, due Taiwan’s smaller size and relative ease of distribution of goods, the CPI I’m assuming would be significantly more constant.