Covid recovery puts shine on Asia Pacific
If you’re wealthy, Asia Pacific is the most expensive place to live in, with Shanghai overtaking Hong Kong as the priciest city in the world.
Those are some of the key findings from a Julius Baer Group report about luxury lifestyles released on Friday, which stated that part of the reason for the region’s success was its swift recovery from the coronavirus pandemic.
By contrast, the Americas is the most affordable because of the slump in the US and Canadian dollars and sharp devaluations of Latin American currencies.
Asian cities are more expensive partly because “Covid didn’t become an epidemic quite the same way it unfortunately became in the other cities in the index”, said Rajesh Manwani, Julius Baer’s head of markets & wealth management solutions in Asia Pacific. “So they were able to function more normally than the others.”
The Covid-19 crisis has enriched the wealthy. Those from the tech industry have done particularly well as lockdowns helped accelerate a switch to online for everything from learning to shopping and socialising.
Overall, though, living a luxury lifestyle around the world became only about 1% more expensive in 2020, with the rich increasingly turning to conscious choices that may result in fairer prices for producers, according to the report.