Having had (and from what it is looks like, still having) many opportunities to live different countries where standards of living vis-a-vis their relative costs varies dramatically, the author has come to realize that the common perception that more developed countries = more expensive actually is just a misconception. The belief that better the standard of living, the more it costs, from a comparative global perspective, seem to have little factual basis on the ground to support it. The author's latest physical move help further validate the theory.
As frequent followers of this blog would know, the author has been bumming around a traveling unemployed person for the past month or so, after making a dramatic exit from Rocket Internet, where he worked for the past year and the half. Now, after some serious job- (and soul-) searching, he has decided to temporarily depart from a corporate world that has disappointed him so much in the recent past, and take a stab at doing serious academic research at the Political Science Institute of Academia Sinica in Taipei as a full-time Research Assistant.
Now that is all nice-sounding and all on paper, but the big problem is that, compared to the previous Rocket job, taking up the next one at Taipei will take a massive wage cut. Of course, naturally, one would worry about just how much the standard of living will decline correspondingly. The author generally lives minimally and has little materialistic requirements, but he still worries whether he can still live in a relatively safe and comfortable place with enough privacy and convenience, without breaking his now significantly shrunken bank.
Thankfully, a brief examination of rental prices in Taipei, near Academia Sinica, gave the author a certain degree of comfort. Furnish rooms with utility prices included in shared houses on average cost a mere 150 USD per month, with good locations near work, shops, and metro stations. Similar stuff even in the Philippines, not to mention expensive places like Japan, would cost an easily 4-8 times as much. The thought of saving on housing, but also gets the author thinking. Why would a place as developed and densely populated as Taipei have such cheap prices.
Thus goes back to the theory mentioned in the first paragraph. To elaborate, the author thinks there are three types of countries out there when it comes to expat costs. (1) generally expensive places for both locals and expats Japan and Western Europe are the prime examples. Here, expats and locals alike pay high prices, get good stuff. (2) places where expats cannot share in local resources for fear of safety and inconvenience. Limited amount of expat-oriented resources cause their prices to be high. Most developing countries fall in this category.
In (2), expats would pay high prices and get good stuff, but live almost completely different lives from their local counterparts, as is the case in Philippines. And then there are likes of Taiwan and more developed Eastern Europe like Slovenia that fall into (3). Here, countries are not as developed as in (1), but expats can tolerate the living conditions of the locals. Safety and convenience in mingling within local communities are generally a non-issue. As a benefit of that, expats pay local prices, which are lower than (1) but higher than the non-accessible ones in (2).
So, in essence, expats get to enjoy living in relatively well-off situations in (3) but pays by far the lowest expat cost of living among the three categories. It is little wonder that people tend to overlook this third category, though, most likely because they do not have the high-class standards of countries in (1) but also do not have the significant and idealistic "helping out the developing world" appeals of the countries in (2). But looking beyond such obvious point, countries of (3) could very much be places where status of being an expat means least due to possibility of mingling with locals cheaply.
One final note on the use of the Taiwan example. The author, being fluent in Chinese, admittedly did use only Chinese language sites for searching through housing options and getting more price info on the island. So, the prices might be very much biased, and reflect something that non-Chinese-speaking expats may have a hard time finding and obtaining. Still, one should never underestimate the power of Internet resources, as there could very much be English resources offering similar prices that the author has yet to come across. The argument should thus stand as it is.
As frequent followers of this blog would know, the author has been bumming around a traveling unemployed person for the past month or so, after making a dramatic exit from Rocket Internet, where he worked for the past year and the half. Now, after some serious job- (and soul-) searching, he has decided to temporarily depart from a corporate world that has disappointed him so much in the recent past, and take a stab at doing serious academic research at the Political Science Institute of Academia Sinica in Taipei as a full-time Research Assistant.
Now that is all nice-sounding and all on paper, but the big problem is that, compared to the previous Rocket job, taking up the next one at Taipei will take a massive wage cut. Of course, naturally, one would worry about just how much the standard of living will decline correspondingly. The author generally lives minimally and has little materialistic requirements, but he still worries whether he can still live in a relatively safe and comfortable place with enough privacy and convenience, without breaking his now significantly shrunken bank.
Thankfully, a brief examination of rental prices in Taipei, near Academia Sinica, gave the author a certain degree of comfort. Furnish rooms with utility prices included in shared houses on average cost a mere 150 USD per month, with good locations near work, shops, and metro stations. Similar stuff even in the Philippines, not to mention expensive places like Japan, would cost an easily 4-8 times as much. The thought of saving on housing, but also gets the author thinking. Why would a place as developed and densely populated as Taipei have such cheap prices.
Thus goes back to the theory mentioned in the first paragraph. To elaborate, the author thinks there are three types of countries out there when it comes to expat costs. (1) generally expensive places for both locals and expats Japan and Western Europe are the prime examples. Here, expats and locals alike pay high prices, get good stuff. (2) places where expats cannot share in local resources for fear of safety and inconvenience. Limited amount of expat-oriented resources cause their prices to be high. Most developing countries fall in this category.
In (2), expats would pay high prices and get good stuff, but live almost completely different lives from their local counterparts, as is the case in Philippines. And then there are likes of Taiwan and more developed Eastern Europe like Slovenia that fall into (3). Here, countries are not as developed as in (1), but expats can tolerate the living conditions of the locals. Safety and convenience in mingling within local communities are generally a non-issue. As a benefit of that, expats pay local prices, which are lower than (1) but higher than the non-accessible ones in (2).
So, in essence, expats get to enjoy living in relatively well-off situations in (3) but pays by far the lowest expat cost of living among the three categories. It is little wonder that people tend to overlook this third category, though, most likely because they do not have the high-class standards of countries in (1) but also do not have the significant and idealistic "helping out the developing world" appeals of the countries in (2). But looking beyond such obvious point, countries of (3) could very much be places where status of being an expat means least due to possibility of mingling with locals cheaply.
One final note on the use of the Taiwan example. The author, being fluent in Chinese, admittedly did use only Chinese language sites for searching through housing options and getting more price info on the island. So, the prices might be very much biased, and reflect something that non-Chinese-speaking expats may have a hard time finding and obtaining. Still, one should never underestimate the power of Internet resources, as there could very much be English resources offering similar prices that the author has yet to come across. The argument should thus stand as it is.
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