Cost of living

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Cost of living is the cost that a household has to pay to support everyday life .

The cost of living includes all domestic and international expenses for:

To determine the cost of living, national statistical offices (in Germany the Federal Statistical Office , in Austria Statistics Austria , in Switzerland the Federal Statistical Office ) use a so-called shopping basket . This contains the consumption habits of an average household. However, since the expenses for (often compulsory) health insurance are missing in the shopping cart, the cost of living does not include all expenses for a household. In addition to the respective goods and their quality, the average quantities purchased in a period of time (usually one month) are also important (weighting number). In order to enable comparisons with previous years, a price index is used , in Germany the consumer price index for Germany, in Austria the consumer price index , in Switzerland the national consumer price index . Switzerland is one of the top European cities when it comes to the cost of living . So include Zurich (3rd place), Geneva (5) and Bern (9) of the ten cities with the highest cost of living in each world. Other cities in the top ten are: Luanda (1), Hong Kong (2), Singapore (4), Shanghai (6), Beijing (7), Seoul (8) and N'Djamena (10).

Cost of living in a European comparison

Compared to the average cost of living in 2018 across all 26 EU countries, according to t-online.de, based on the data from Destatis and Eurostat, the following deviations result. (With in comparison are the cost of living in relation to the EU average of the non-EU countries Iceland, Switzerland, Norway and Great Britain.)

  • Iceland + 56.1%
  • Switzerland + 51.9%
  • Norway + 47.7%
  • Denmark + 37.9%
  • Ireland + 27.3%
  • Luxembourg + 26.6%
  • Finland + 22.5%
  • Sweden + 18.5%
  • Great Britain + 16.5%
  • Netherlands + 12.1%
  • Belgium + 11.1%
  • France + 10.3%
  • Austria + 9.6%
  • Germany + 4.3%
  • Italy + 0.6%
  • Spain -7.5%
  • Cyprus -11.2%
  • Portugal -13.2%
  • Slovenia -15.1%
  • Greece -15.8%
  • Malta -17.8%
  • Estonia -19.9%
  • Latvia -26.2%
  • Czech Republic -29.2%
  • Slovakia -29.8%
  • Croatia -31.8%
  • Lithuania -34.3%
  • Hungary -37.6%
  • Poland -42.6%
  • Romania -47.2%
  • Bulgaria -49.4%

Historical comparisons of the cost of living

The assessment of living standards in pre-industrial times, and especially the conversion of historical values ​​and prices to today's equivalents, require highly differentiated approaches. No yardstick is the same everywhere: Differences between essential and social livelihoods, regionally and temporally much more extreme than nowadays fluctuating food prices and wages or completely differently assemblable " shopping baskets " make a direct comparison of information from historical sources with each other and with today's conditions difficult. Nonetheless, research in the history of social and cultural history has tried methodically and quantitatively to illustrate social history differences and developments.

Web links

Wiktionary: Cost of Living  - Explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Switzerland, Africa, Asia: It is the most expensive here. Mercer LLC , June 17, 2015, accessed June 17, 2015 .
  2. ↑ Zurich is again the most expensive city in the world. Swiss Radio and Television (SRF), March 3, 2015, accessed on June 17, 2015 .
  3. ↑ Zurich and Geneva are now considered the most expensive cities in the world. Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ), March 3, 2015, accessed on June 17, 2015 .
  4. ↑ Cost of living in comparison: This is the most expensive country in Europe. In: t-online.de. June 24, 2019, accessed June 25, 2019 .
  5. ↑ Rolf Engelsing outlines the problem: Costs of living and the cost of living in the 18th and 19th centuries in the Hanseatic cities of Bremen and Hamburg , In: International Review of Social History 11 (1966), pp. 73-107. - Further material in: P. Ballin: The household of the working classes , Berlin 1881; Antje Kraus: The lower classes of Hamburg in the first half of the 19th century , Stuttgart 1965; Lothar Schneider: The workers' household in the 18th and 19th centuries , Berlin 1967; Gerhard Bry: Wages in Germany 1871-1945 , Princeton 1960; EH Phelps Brown and Margaret Browne: A Century of Pay: The Course of Pay and Production in France, Germany, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States, 1860-1960 , London 1968; E. Conrad: Lifestyle of 22 working-class families in Munich , Munich 1909; H. Mebner: The household and the standard of living of a Leipzig working-class family , in: Schmollers Jahrbuch, 2nd part, 1 (1887), pp. 304–334.