Mumbai, Delhi among least expensive cities

Mumbai and New Delhi rank among the most inexpensive cities to live in, according to a global survey of prices and earnings by investment bank UBS.

The UBS study has compiled a new Big Mac index to estimate the combined impact of cost of living and average wages earned.

The index essentially estimates the number of work hours people have to put in to pay for a Big Mac, the McDonalds flagship product, which had earlier been used to compute the purchasing power parity of various currencies. The survey has covered 71 cities across the world.

It has found that on an average, workers in Mumbai and New Delhi have to work for more than an hour against the global average of 35 minutes of work.

In fact, workers in US cities "" Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and Miami "" have to put in only 13 minutes of labour to earn enough to buy a Big Mac.

"Wages only become meaningful in relation to prices, ie, what can be bought with the money earned. A globally available product like a Big Mac can make the relationship between wages and prices much clearer," the study says.

The study reveals that even though Asian workers were living with low hourly wages, they were working for longer hours, thus taking home a fatter pay package than global averages.

The UBS study reports "people work longest in the Asian cities, with a mean annual working time of 2088 hours."

Based on a 42-hour work week, Asian workers labour about 60 days a year more than their peers in Paris, where a working year is just 1480 hours, or in Berlin, where a years' work equals 1610 hours.

The study found Asians shared a common platform with the Americans in their regard for earned income.

"Wage levels and leisure time determine prosperity, but more leisure time leads to greater prosperity only when wages reach an adequate level," the report said.