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Cost of living is an important consideration for the decision-making of expatriates and investment decisions of businesses. As competition between cities for talent and capital becomes global instead of national, the need for timely and internationally comparable information on global cities’ cost of living increases. While commercial research houses frequently publish cost of living surveys, these reports can be lacking in terms of scientific rigour. In this context, this paper aims to contribute to the literature by formulating a comprehensive and rigorous methodology to compare the cost of living for expatriates in 103 world’s major cities.

A cost of living index for expatriates composed of the ten consumption categories is constructed. The results from the study covers a study period from 2005 to 2014 in 103 cities. More than 280 individual prices of 165 goods and services have been compiled for each city in the calculation of the cost of living index for expatriates. New York has been chosen as the base city for the study, with other cities being benchmarked against it. A larger cost of living index for expatriates implies that the city is more expensive for expatriates to live in and vice versa.

While the authors generate the cost of living rankings for expatriates for 103 cities worldwide, in this paper, the authors focus on five key cities, namely, London, Hong Kong, Singapore, Tokyo and Zurich, as they are global financial centres. In 2013, the latest year for which data are available, Zurich was the most expensive for expatriates among the five cities, followed by Singapore, Tokyo, London and Hong Kong. These results pertain to the cost of living for expatriates, and cities compare very differently in terms of cost of living for ordinary residents, as ordinary residents follow different consumption patterns from expatriates.

Cost of living in the destination city is a major consideration for professionals who look to relocate, and organisations factor such calculations in their decisions to post employees overseas and design commensurate compensation packages. This paper develops a comprehensive and rigorous methodology for measuring and comparing cost of living for expatriates around the world. The value-addition lies in the fact that the authors are able to differentiate between expatriates and ordinary residents, which has not been done in the existing literature. They use higher quality data and generate an index that is not sensitive to the choice of base city.

Malaysia and Singapore had parted more than five decades ago. Much of the existing literature concerned about the bilateral ties between two economies focusing on the political economy perspective. This paper aims to provide insights on the economic development and prospects of Malaysia and Singapore at the national level. In addition, this paper also makes a pioneering attempt at conducting a comprehensive comparative analysis between Malaysia and Singapore at the city level.

This paper offers a case study of Malaysia and Singapore by assessing their national economic competitiveness, urban standards of living and quality of life. The paper leverages on a series of indices such as the competitiveness index for ASEAN-10, the cost of living, wages and purchasing power of ordinary residents, as well as the liveable cities index to perform the analysis.

In terms of national competitiveness, the analysis shows that Singapore and Malaysia have been leading the ASEAN region from 2000 onwards, being the top- and second-ranked, respectively. Malaysia still lags Singapore in several aspects such as attractiveness to foreign investors and standard of living, education and social stability despite insignificant differences in the ranking. City-level analysis shows that the cost of living in Singapore is almost double of that in Kuala Lumpur, although living in Singapore is more affordable owing to the higher wage rate received by the ordinary citizens.

This paper contributes to the literature in several ways. First, this paper assesses economic development in Singapore and Malaysia instead of focusing on cross-straits relations. Second, the study reflects the view that the improvement of standards of living and quality of life for ordinary residents is paramount to economic development. The competitiveness index and city-level benchmarks used in the paper reflect the standards of living and the quality-of-life dimensions. Third, the focus on city-level analysis in addition to conventional national-level analysis helps to provide policymakers with practical policy implications against the backdrop of rapid urbanisation.

The paper offers the first systematic and comprehensive analysis of dynamics of economic growth slowdown for India at the sub-national level covering the period 1993–2013. In light of India’s regional diversity and variation in terms of gross regional domestic product (GRDP) per capita, the purpose of this paper is to empirically investigate the growth dynamics at the sub-national level. The paper aims to answer two questions: first, are determinants of economic slowdown likely to differ across income groups? Second, what are the probabilities that the sub-national economies in India will experience a growth slowdown in the near future?

The paper undertakes a comprehensive analysis of growth slowdown for 106 Asian developing economies encompassing the national economies in ASEAN and the sub-national economies in Greater China, Indonesia and India. To be sure, the authors are not making any direct comparison to countries at different stages of economic development; rather, the comparison is between economies/sub-national economies that fall in the same income category. The authors construct income group-specific logistic model to identify the relevant determinants of growth slowdown and use Bayesian model averaging techniques as a robustness check. The authors also compute economy-specific predictive probabilities of growth slowdown over the period 2012–2017.

The empirical results show that a growth slowdown in various income groups tends to be associated with different sets of determinants, although broadly, across all income groups, the occurrence of growth slowdown is positively associated with higher GRDP per capita. The average predictive probability of growth slowdown for India’s sub-national economies is 0.43, indicating that, on average, India’s sub-national economies have a 43 per cent chance of experiencing growth slowdown in the 2012–2017 period. Overall, the prospects of the sub-national economies of India are less worrying than that of Greater Chinese economies but bleaker than the outlook for economies in ASEAN and Indonesia.

The research contributes to the understandings of growth dynamics, especially the issue of growth slowdown, in India. This paper differs from the existing literature on growth dynamics by being India centric and analysing the issue of growth slowdown at the sub-national level. Despite a steady increase in the level of GRDP per capita for the sub-national economies of India since 1993, significant disparities still exist across economies. Identifying determinants of growth slowdown and subsequently computing predictive probabilities serves as early warning signs for policy-makers and generates insights on how development policy can be shaped.

In Vietnam, there is a phenomenon that domestic tourists return to some tourist destinations despite their reputation of tourists being scammed. This study aims to focusses on Vung Tau City in Vietnam as a popular seaside destination to explain this interesting phenomenon.

Thereby, 22 domestic tourists who are repeated visitors and had experienced scams directly and/or indirectly in Vung Tau were interviewed and later took part in a self-evaluation.

The data shows that unreasonable charges, switching products, false reporting and dishonest middle-persons are the major dominant scams in the city. Furthermore, all visitors could be scammed regardless of gender, educational background or age. Even though scams may occur, the city remains to be a popular getaway destination for the Southern part of Vietnam due to its irreplaceable natural resources and visit intention of domestic tourists. The local authority has tried different ways to suppress issues related to tourist scams, however, due to their sociocultural and economic conditions, scams find ways to exist. Under this circumstance, domestic tourists tend to figure out how to handle scams by themselves whilst very few of them rely on the public sector to deal with them.

Finally, some practical strategies and recommendations are given as a reference for the local authority and businesses for long-term tourist business development.

This paper, respectively, investigates the common scams against domestic tourists in Vung Tau, reasons they still return to this destination, and finally, how these visitors attempt to avoid scams.