Leading Article: What's a dollar worth? Just ask the Swiss
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Your support makes all the difference.YOU HAVE to hand it to the Swiss. To Swiss bankers, actually. Once again the Union Bank of Switzerland has produced its report on prices and wages in cities around the world. The ninth edition includes new locations such as Budapest and Prague in its list of 53 cities in which, with typical thoroughness, the men from UBS have calculated everything from the weekly working hours of a Lagos bus driver (48) to the annual remuneration of a Geneva bank clerk (dollars 66,500).
The bank works in dollars because it considers the greenback a universal currency. It goes to inordinate lengths to iron out some 20,000 data, taking into account all the complications posed by exchange rates and different purchasing power in various countries. But no matter how you consider the figures, one overwhelming impression emerges from the league tables. With the possible exception of the Japanese, the Swiss are the most well-off folk on earth and the British are embarrassingly poor.
Perhaps the most annoying thing about this survey is that one knows it has been conducted with utter fairness, being Swiss. It is so virtuous it is even printed on 'environmentally friendly paper made from pulp bleached entirely without chlorine'. Irritation deepens on discovering the comparison between the income of an average London departmental manager, which is dollars 37,000 subject to 32.3 per cent tax and social security deductions, and the salary of his or her counterpart in Zurich, which is dollars 120,700, subject to tax and social security deductions of 31.6 per cent.
It doesn't stop there. The Swiss salary is not only three times higher than the UK package, but buys more goods and services. The Zurich wage-earner must work for 21 minutes to buy a Big Mac and french fries, the Londoner for 36. A user of London public transport pays an average dollars 1.94 for that dubious privilege, while the Geneva resident enjoys its sparkling efficiency for only dollars 1.40. And so on.
All of this is hopelessly subjective, of course, but it does explain the tale of the confused American news photographer who landed in Zurich after a trip around six African countries whose basket-case currencies he generically knew as the Gugu. 'How many Gugus to the dollar here?' he demanded of the smoothly tailored bank clerk. The response was polite: 'Here, mein Herr, ze dollar is ze Gugu.'
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