LONDON – Go further, Paris and Hong Kong. In 2021, the city with the highest cost of living in the world is Tel Aviv, news that may surprise the rest of the planet but not the Israelis and those who know it well. The “Collina della Primavera”, this is what its name means, although it lies on a flat Mediterranean coast and has a very long summer rather than a middle season, it has obtained the title, which is actually not very coveted, by virtue of a galloping inflation in the last year, with increasingly higher prices for services, food and rents. The value of real estate does not fall within the categories considered by the ranking, compiled annually by the Economist Intelligence Unit, an offshoot of the weekly magazine of the same name: otherwise it is likely that it would have been surpassed by other metropolises, such as New York and London, where the brick is to be always sky high. Nicknamed the “Jewish Miami” for its vibrant lifestyle, which has one of the global high-tech capitals of the nearby Herzliya suburb, however, Tel Aviv had long been among the most expensive cities on earth.
In the past twelve months, however, it has moved up five spots to the top of the world‘s most expensive cities, taking the top spot crown from Paris, Hong Kong and Zurich, which had won it evenly in 2020. This year the French capital is second along with Singapore, with Zurich and Hong Kong in fourth and fifth place completing the top five. New York is sixth, Geneva seventh, Copenhagen eighth, Los Angeles ninth and Osaka tenth. London, which in 2020 was in twentieth position, has climbed three steps to seventeenth, driven by the price increases that are pressing (and worrying) here too. The strength of the shekel, the Israeli currency, against the dollar also contributed to bringing Tel Aviv to the top.
In the ranking ofEconomist, prepared by analyzing data of 50,000 goods in 173 cities between August and September, Rome also appears, which recorded the greatest decline in the cost of living, passing from sixteenth to forty-eighth position, with a particular decline in food and clothing. The general ups and downs were affected by the upheavals caused to the world economy by the Covid pandemic, including lockdowns that stopped everything for months and huge public spending to keep companies and workers going. At the bottom of the ranking, which from a certain point of view would be the first, are the cities with the lowest cost of living: Damascus, the capital of Syria, is the cheapest of all, followed by Tripoli in Libya and Tashkent in Uzbekistan. But even if they are places to live on little, there is no rush to move there.
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