Purchasing Power vs. Currency Conversion
Why "how much is $X in Y currency" and "what does $X actually buy in country Y" are two completely different questions.
Two different questions
A currency converter answers one question: "what does my money convert to at today's exchange rate?" That's useful for a single transaction — booking a hotel, paying for a flight. But it says nothing about what that money is actually worth once you're living somewhere, because it ignores local prices entirely.
What purchasing power actually measures
Purchasing power asks a different question: "if I earn this much at home, what salary would give me a comparable standard of living somewhere else?" A $2,000/month salary converts to the same number of rupees or euros no matter where you live — but what that money can actually buy (rent, food, transport) varies enormously by country. Purchasing-power comparisons account for that difference; currency conversion doesn't.
How RouteWise calculates it
Rather than a subjective cost-of-living index, RouteWise derives a real, per-country "price level" from each country's own paired ILOSTAT earnings figures — average earnings in nominal USD versus average earnings in PPP-adjusted terms. That ratio is a real, independently-sourced indicator of how far a dollar actually stretches in a given country, not an estimate we invented.