GHRM COL Index Calculator

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Cost-of-Living Index Calculator

The Cost-of-Living Index Calculator is totally flexible, allowing you to adjust our COL indices for exchange rate, inflation and unavailable products in the host location, while also allowing you to customise the index components to your own requirements and access the actual price list supporting the index.

This calculator provides the possibility of running an index calculation with flexible options:

Select the basket - Mercer's international basket is the standard basket. Customised baskets are available upon special request.
Index currency - All indices are calculated on the basis of host country currency units per home country currency units. There is no need to change the default currency (USD) unless you want to see item prices in a currency of your choice.
Select the survey date
Select the countries and cities for both base and host locations
Adjust for exchange rate - Standard exchange rates for both home and host locations are the valid exchange rates for the survey date selected, however you are able to update this to a more recent rate.

Optional inflation adjustments

Adjust for inflation - Adjust the index for estimated changes in local currency prices in the base and/or host cities by selecting the date for which you wish to make the adjustment. You can also enter a different rate by overwriting the given amount.

Special Options

Adjust for unavailable products in the host location - Three options:
1. Automatic Replaced Method - Mercer's standard index calculation, where unavailable products in the host city are replaced by the home city prices - on the assumption that these are available in the home city.
2. Available Products Only checkbox - Unavailable products will not be considered in the index calculation.
3. Alternative Location - Choose a third location where the unavailable products in the host city can be purchased (closely located city where the employee can easily shop). These product prices are then included in the index calculation and allow the completion of the basket.

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Cost-of-Living index calculation results - three available indices:

Mean to Mean - Compares the mean prices (average price of each item) in the base city to the mean prices in the host city.
Efficient - Compares the average of the low and mid prices in the base city to the mean prices in the host city.
Convenience - Compares the average of the low and mid prices in the base city to the high prices in the host city, except for selected categories for which it compares mean base prices.

The results of the calculation open into a new browser window showing the ten categories that compose Mercer's international basket.

You can easily print and compare results. When selecting the calculator interface again, you may choose another option (i.e. update inflation), click on the calculate button and the new result will show in an additional window. You can then compare both results by simply selecting either windows.

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Customise the index basket

You can customise the index basket components by selecting the checkboxes to include or exclude any of the categories from the total index. The index recalculates accordingly.

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Actual price list by categories

Select a link from the categories - i.e. clothing and footwear

The page displays the prices of each item that compose the selected category for the base city and the host city.
When an item is unavailable in the location the price shows 0.

The index calculator automatically applies the Replaced Method and replaces unavailable product prices in the host city with the prices from the base city. Unless you have chosen the Available Products Only option or the Alternative Host City option.

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