Surprisingly, Singapore is just 6th costliest city to live in

Check out which cities beat Singapore.

According to the Worldwide Cost of Living 2013 conducted by The Economist Intelligence Unit, Singapore ranked 6th as the world’s most expensive city to live in.

Tokyo has reclaimed the top spot from Zurich pushing the latter down to the 7th spot.

Here’s more:

After currency swings pushed Zurich to the top of the ranking last year, Tokyo has resumed its place as the world’s most expensive city. This is a familiar position for the Japanese capital, which has been the world’s most expensive city for all but a handful of the last 20 years.

In fact, since 1992 Tokyo has been the topranking city in every year bar six. Only Zurich, Paris and Oslo were dubbed the world’s most expensive city during this time. 

This comes despite a fall in the relative cost of living in Tokyo (against the base city of New York) due to Japanese deflation, a weaker yen and rising prices elsewhere in the world. In Switzerland, efforts to weaken the franc meant that the relative fall in Zurich and Geneva was much stronger.

In fact, relative to New York, the two Swiss cities saw the steepest declines of all 131 cities surveyed. Zurich experienced an index decline of 39 percentage points, falling from the world’s most expensive city 12 months ago to its seventh most expensive now. A 33-percentage-point decline prompted Geneva to fall seven places to tenth place.

One of the features of the cost-of-living ranking over the last few years has been the rise of many Asian cities offsetting traditionally more costly European locations.

In particular, Australian cities have been rising very quickly up the rankings as economic growth has supported inflation and currency swings to make them more costly. This survey is no exception. Ten years ago there were no Australian cities among the 50 most expensive cities.

Two years ago Australian cities began to be ranked among the ten most expensive. The current survey sees Australian cities reach the highest-ranked position yet, with Sydney rated the third most expensive city surveyed and Melbourne ranked in fifth place.

Australian cities are joined by cities in New Zealand and the rising Asian hubs of Singapore and Hong Kong in a top 20 where Asian cities are dominant. Asian cities make up 11 of the world’s 20 most expensive compared with eight from Europe. A decade ago this was six Asian vs ten European cities, with four cities from the USA.

The current ranking still fails to include any cities from North America among the 20 most expensive, despite widespread decline in the cost of living relative to US cities.