10-05-2012, 02:46 PM
(10-05-2012, 12:25 PM)eppie Wrote: You are much richer because e.g. your land prices (for building a house for example) are probably 10 times cheaper than in Holland.....that is if you want to live close to a big city.....otherwise it is probably 1000 times cheaper.
If land prices are high, that means a country is rich, not poor, because nearly all countries own nearly all of their own land. Land prices in Monaco are crazily high. Land prices in Chad are trivial.
The international comparison is a little tricky, because of course it's very difficult to compare like with like - there is nowhere like Nunavut in the Netherlands, so what would it usefully mean that you could buy an enormous slice of permafrosted tundra for the same price as an apartment in Utrecht? Similarly, you can't compare a farm in Friesland with a skyscraper in Toronto. If we compare downtown property with downtown property, I suspect you'll find the gap is not even very large between North American cities and European ones, although it does of course depend on a lot of factors. And while North American cities tend to have extensive suburbs, the Netherlands just has more cities.
-Jester