Where is the best bus for less money? As soon as you move a little around Europe or even within the peninsula, you will discover that coffee in Madrid does not cost as much as in Soria. And we’re not even talking about renting or buying an apartment. There are places where one euro pays much more than others, and if your budget is limited (more or less, the bar is at a different height for everyone), you appreciate it. Well, with these criteria it appears that mid-sized cities in Southern and Central Eastern Europe offer a quality of life comparable to much more expensive cities, but for less money.
This is the conclusion reached by financial analyst Valery Emelianov (a Russian who lives in Porto, as a spoiler), author of this quality of life graph that collects 125 European cities based on data from a collaborative platform Numbeo. It is, in short, a value-value assessment of cities, which, when applied to sociology, not only reduces to income, but also adds other more or less intangible factors. An example: you may earn more in X than in Y, but if you have to pay for health care in X, sooner or later it won’t be worth it.
Beyond satisfying our curiosity, this scatter chart reflects a kind of migration: made possible by remote work. Working for a Swedish company in Malaga is a great idea for that worker’s pocket. But it’s not so good for the people of Malaga who have to compete with him for a rental apartment or to find a coffee for three euros that seems like a real gift to Sweden. As reported by the European Youth Portal, Make a city attractive to digital nomads This can make housing and vacations more expensive and cause problems for those who live there.
Quality of life and prices of European cities, in a graph
The graph in question is a scatterplot where each city is ranked by its cost of living percentage and quality of life percentage. To measure quality of life, Numbeo aggregates eight sub-indices: purchasing power, safety, health, cost of living, housing price versus income, travel time, pollution and climate, and from there, it combines user input with manually collected data from various sources such as public institutions.
However, the authors have removed elements associated with value from quality of life so as not to duplicate candidates’ affordability. In any case, the graph should be taken as a guide and not as something complete, homogeneous and official, because it affects perception and is introduced by “someone” and ignores essential factors such as salary.
What you pay vs. what you get in European cities. Visual Capitalist
If we search Cities with the best quality-price ratio Considering the percentage of cost and the percentage of quality, we have to go to the first quadrant (the one in green), where three Croatian cities and one Portuguese city appear: Osijek (27.6 and 98.8) followed by Porto (32.4 and 93.2) and then Pilsen (36.0 and 87.6) and Ri.396). At the premium end, where the quality of life is high although they are expensive, then we have to go to the blue quadrant and the map to the center of Europe, especially the Dutch The Hague (81.2 and 99.6) and Groningen (74.4 and 97.2) or the capital of Austria and (90. 80). The most expensive cities in that quadrant are in Switzerland: Zurich takes the cake, followed by its neighbors: Basel, Geneva, Bern and Lausanne.
In areas of high cost and low quality (red square) There are great classics like London (91.6 and 17.2), Paris (86.8 and 16.4), Milan (84.4 and 14.0) or Brussels (78.8 and 19.6). There are many Ukrainian cities in cheap and low-quality areas, such as Dnipro or Odessa, although we imagine that the context of the war has an effect.
The four cities of the Spanish kingdom appear on the graph, but their fortunes are uneven. Thus, Valencia (cost 34.4, quality 84.4; index 53.6 and 182.0) and Malaga (33.2 and 78.8; index 53.0 and 178.2) are in the green quadrant, that is, high quality and low cost, Madrid and 49.60 and 49. 178.3) in the quadrant. about to jump Blue, with high quality of life, but at a high price. The worst is Barcelona (50.8 and 37.2; index 61.5 and 150.1), with prices similar to Madrid but with a much lower quality percentage.
Regardless, the quartet’s appeal lies Universal health care, Mediterranean climate and lifestyle. Of course, rent has a lot to say: a look at the Enalquiler portal shows that the average price in Madrid or Barcelona is around 2,400 euros/month, while in Valencia and Malaga they are around 1,700 euros. However, while rents continued to rise in Madrid and Malaga, they fell in the past year in Barcelona and Valencia, according to data from the same portal.
In Xataka | We used to believe that “you don’t live anywhere like Spain.” This world ranking of quality of life does not have the same opinion
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cover Valery Emelyanov via Visual Capitalist
