Caspian, Regional Countries Ranked as Lowest Cost of Living

Numbeo.com, considered the world’s largest, independent database of user-contributed statistics about countries and cities across the globe, recently added Azerbaijan, Georgia, Armenia, Russia and Turkey to its 2017 Cost of Living Index.

On March 21 the Serbia-based research company published its list, which features 121 countries around the globe ranked according to their cost of living.

Russia, coming in at 81, has the highest cost of living in the Caspian region. Other countries ranked include Iran (92), followed by Armenia (103), Kazakhstan (110), Azerbaijan (116) and Georgia (117).  These figures indicate several Caspian and Transcaucasia nations, such as Georgia and Azerbaijan, have some of the lowest costs of living in the world, giving both residents and tourists more value for their money.

Numbeo.com’s Cost of Living indices are relative indicators of consumer goods prices including groceries, restaurants, transportation, utilities, as well as rent and mortgages. The index is built around what it calls “a best guess” of average expenses in a given city for a four-person family. Data for country rankings are based upon the aggregate of city-level calculations for that country.

“As we rely mostly on voluntary contributions, we include a country if we have enough contributors for that country, which is currently set to at least 55,” said Mladen Adamovic, former Google software engineer and Numbeo’s Founder and CEO, in an interview with Caspian News.

“To calculate average values we use many algorithms, and data provided by users and manually collected by our interns from a list of sources and references. For each item, we assign a weight and calculate an index, usually relating to New York City,” Adamovic said.

Numbeo.com was launched in April 2009 and is considered the first free database, independent of any government or organization, providing information about cost of living that uses structured data and indices.