A study of prices and earnings in the world’s major cities by UBS has found that Oslo, Zurich, Copenhagen, Geneva, Tokyo and New York are the world’s most expensive places to live, while London has fallen sharply since it was last measured in 2006.

Based on a standardised basket of 122 goods and services, the “prices and earnings” study by the Swiss bank showed that the least expensive places were Kuala Lumpur, Manila, Delhi and Mumbai.

The study, published once every three years, was based on data collected in 73 cities around the world between March and April of this year, UBS said.

The survey found that employees in Copenhagen, Zurich, Geneva and New York have the highest gross wages. Zurich and Geneva – the two Swiss cities in the study – top the rankings in the international comparison of net wages. By contrast, the average employee in Delhi, Manila, Jakarta and Mumbai earns less than one-fifteenth of Swiss hourly wages after taxes.

People work an average of 1,902 hours per year in the surveyed cities but they work much longer in Asian and Middle Eastern cities, averaging 2,119 and 2,063 hours per year respectively, the study showed.

Overall, the most hours are worked in Cairo (2,373 hours per year), followed by Seoul (2,312 hours). People in Lyon and Paris, by contrast, spend the least amount of time at work according to the global comparison: 1,582 and 1,594 hours per year respectively.

London, the second most expensive city in the 2006 review, plummeted nearly twenty places following the pound's precipitous devaluation in March and April 2009 when the data was collected, landing in the middle in terms of Western European countries.