Dubliners enjoy fourth highest wages but pay tenth highest prices in world
The Prices and Earnings Report, published every three years by Swiss bank UBS, has found that net wages in the US, Switzerland and Ireland are the highest of 73 countries studied.
The net average wage in Dublin is €13.23 per hour. That compares to €2.75 in Vilnius, Lithuania and just 84c per hour in Mumbai.
The Irish earnings are also bolstered by the fact that at 15%, Irish workers pay a low percentage of their gross wages in taxes and social security contributions compared to other Western citizens.
For example in Copenhagen workers pay 46%, in Amsterdam 35%.
An indication of the disparity in the spread of wealth in this country can be evidenced when the wage figure for Dublin is broken down.
While Dubliners enjoy the fourth highest hourly wage, when one looks at the average industrial wage for the 73 countries, the Irish city slides back down the scale to joint ninth place – a clear indication that outside that sector must be earning well above the international average.
By comparing prices and wage levels in all the countries, the researchers were able to establish that Dublin had the fourth highest purchasing power for their money.
It takes Dubliners 15 minutes to earn enough money to pay for a Big Mac, nine minutes to pay for a kilogramme of bread, 11 minutes to pay for a kilogramme of rice and 10 hours to pay for an iPod nano.
To put that in perspective, in Jakarta a worker would have to work for 136 minutes to pay for a Big Mac at its prices, and in Mumbai someone would have to work for 177 hours to pay off the cost of an iPod nano.
To reach its findings UBS looked at the prices of 122 products and services in each of the 73 countries and established wage averages by studying the incomes in 14 different professions.
Overall it found that goods and services in western Europe were 35% more expensive than in eastern Europe but workers in the west of the continent were receiving more than three times the pay of their eastern counterparts.
