Prices & Purchasing Power

Maybe you've heard of the Big Mac Index or the Tall Latte Index. After converting the currencies, prices around the world can vary considerably for things that cannot ship easily from one place to another. Things like rent, haircuts, a meal at a restaurant. This is the magic of traveling abroad. There are places that are quickly modernizing (hello modern sanitation, broadband, and other first world comforts!), but prices are so still so low you could live like a king. 

There's no simple, clean way to compare real pricing between countries. This site tries to keep things as simple as possible, by roughly estimating the price difference into one number. The baseline is set at an East Coast US city and covers a set of travel-related services like meals and local transportation. 

This is only possible because:

1. It excludes accommodation cost. These can vary considerably even within the same country due to the particularities of the local real estate market, and is impacted by seasonality. Where it is unusually expensive, it'll be noted separately.
2. It's a rough average. Things overall might be 30% cheaper in [X] country, but alcohol might be only 10% cheaper due to high taxes on that one particular thing. 
3. It does apply to anything that can be shipped from place to place at a reasonable cost. For example, iPhones will not cost less in a poorer country. Nor will gold, which costs $1,300/oz in the US, and will cost the equivalent of that anywhere else in the world, no matter how low the average incomes are there.