Local & international industry costs? Try KPMG's Competitive Alternatives report!

It's been <ahem> nine years since I last wrote about KPMG's Competitive Alternatives report.  It was a great resource back then, and has only gotten better over the years.  The biggest change that jumps out at me is that the report now covers some smaller, local cities -- places like Nanaimo, Kelowna, and Lethbridge. From the publisher:

Competitive Alternatives is a biennial KPMG study that focuses on business locations in the NAFTA marketplace, as well as leading mature market countries in Europe and Asia Pacific. This study contains valuable information for any company considering international business location options.

Competitive Alternatives 2014 compares business costs and other competitiveness factors in more than 100 cities, in 10 countries: Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States. For 2014, Competitive Alternatives further expands its coverage in the US, and for the first time includes every US metro area with a population of two million or more.

If all that made no sense to you... here are a few examples of the sorts of information I was able to pull out of the report in the last few minutes:

• * A comparison of facilities costs (running a factory or office) for companies in the medical device manufacturing field that operate in Vancouver, Nanaimo, Toronto, or an averaged-out location generally in Canada, including a breakout of the operating parameters assumed for such a facility (facility size, amount of office equipment, etc.)
• * A detailed chart containing comparisons of the costs of doing business for a telecommunications equipment manufacturing firm in Vancouver, Seattle, San Francisco, and Toronto (again, with a summary of the parameters assumed for such a facility)
• * A look at the average labour costs for international financial services firms with 50 employees and a 14,000 sq. ft. office who set up a business in a downtown area of a city in Canada, the US, the UK, or Germany
• * Ten-year average transportation costs (air freight and surface shipping) for firms in all industries operating in Vancouver, Tokyo, Sydney, London, and Toronto

As always, just send any of your BUS/ECON librarians a note if you have questions. -- MarkB ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Mark Bodnar (Business – Burnaby): mbodnar@sfu.ca

Megan Sorenson (Business – Vancouver): megan_sorenson@sfu.ca

Ania Dymarz (Business – Surrey): adymarz@sfu.ca

Carla Graebner (Economics – Burnaby): cgraebne@sfu.ca