Friday, July 29, 2011

Moving to Kinshasa

Today we look at moving to Kinshasa in Congo Democratic Rep from Dalian in China. We highlight cost of living and other major differences likely to be experienced in our series of short blogs on moving between different international locations.
In Kinshasa people speak French, Lingala, Kiswahili, Kikongo and Tshiluba. In Dalian people speak Mandarin Chinese.

Kinshasa is the capital and largest city of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Dalian is the governing sub-provincial city in the eastern Liaoning Province of Northeast China.
Kinshasa ties with Johannesburg for the status of the second largest city in sub-Saharan Africa and the third largest in the whole continent after Lagos and Cairo. Because the administrative boundaries cover such a vast area, over 60% of the city's land is rural in nature, and the urban area only occupies a small section in the far western end of the province. The city has enjoyed a continuous double-digit increase in GDP since 1992. According to a nationwide appraisal by the National Bureau of Statistics, Dalian ranks eighth among Chinese cities in terms of overall strength. The city’s main industries include machine manufacturing, petrochemicals and oil refining, and electronics.

The overall cost of living rank in Kinshasa is 105 out of 300 global locations, which equates it with middle cost of living locations.  An expatriate moving from Dalian to Kinshasa will experience a change in cost of living of 27.9%.
In terms of the hardship people are likely to experience, assessed in global terms, Kinshasa is ranked as an extreme hardship location with a hardship index of 40% compared to Dalian with a hardship index of 30% which is a high degree of hardship location.

Source: http://www.xpatulator.com as at July 2011.

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