Every year, sometime around June, Mercer releases its annual Cost Of Living Ranking of the world’s cities. Here’s the latest summary for 2016:

Good news: it’s getting cheaper and cheaper to live here in South Africa (for expats, at any rate). Johannesburg and Cape Town for the win.

Of course, it’s a different story to live here and earn Rands. But what that index should be saying is that South Africa is well-placed to be a hub of professional services. After all, we have Skype and Facetime and video-calling on Facebook Messenger – so it’s possible to provide many of those services from here – and all those skilled expats would have to pay tax at the top-end, contributing to the fiscus while taking very little away from it.

And yet, here the Department of Home Affairs sits, busily drumming up new forms of immigration regulation.

But perhaps I’m just biased.

For more: “Why I’m Moving To South Africa” and “The Low Cost of South African Living”

Rolling Alpha posts about finance, economics, and sometimes stuff that is only quite loosely related. Follow me on Twitter @RollingAlpha, or like my page on Facebook at www.facebook.com/rollingalpha. Or both.