How to Compare Cost of Living Between Countries
What "cost of living" actually means on RouteWise, and why we deliberately don't show housing, transport, or utilities estimates.
What we actually track
RouteWise's cost-of-living signal is built from a real food-cost index (VanBasket/World Bank ICP data, a relative index where 100 = world average), converted into an estimated restaurant-meal price using a disclosed $15 world-average-meal anchor. Where available, we add real WHO healthcare-coverage scores and a safety percentile from OWID/UNODC homicide-rate data.
Why not housing, transport, or utilities?
No free, legal, per-country dataset publishes those categories at the granularity we'd need — so rather than estimating numbers we can't verify, we simply don't show them. A narrower, honest comparison beats a broader, invented one.
Comparing two countries directly
Every country page shows the same real signals side by side, so a comparison is always apples to apples — the same food-cost index methodology, the same healthcare and safety data sources, for every country we cover.