Finance Minister Shaukat Tarin on Sunday tweeted that Pakistan was the “least costly among 139 countries” of the world and shared a picture showing the country standing at the bottom of the Numbeo ranking, prompting people already battered with inflation and increased oil prices to review the claim.

Aaj News Digital looked into the link and tried to find if the data was relative to the country’s prevailing economic condition.

“Numbeo is the world’s largest cost of living database. Numbeo is also a crowd-sourced global database of quality of life informations including housing indicators, perceived crime rates, and quality of healthcare, among many other statistics,” according to its website.

It added that 7,545,440 prices in 10,531 cities so far have been entered by 630,812 contributors. Upon clicking Pakistan on the countries list, a pop up arises that asks the user that “comparisons improve with every new data that you enter.” Moreover, the data also puts up a question about the current commodities prices in the place you are living.

The finance minister’s claim comes after the government hiked oil prices by a whooping Rs12 increase, with the statement that “despite the increase in the prices of petroleum products, petroleum levy and sales tax have been kept to a minimum.”

The opposition leaders and the public slammed the hike which came at a time when people were already complaining of rising inflation and high basic commodities prices.

Although the government has introduced relief programmes like Ehsaas under which meals, monthly stipends and assistance on the basic utilities were also provided, people are reeling under the burden of inflation.

Primarily, the Numbeo data works on information provided by users from around the world. Its online software “uses the wisdom of the crowd to get as reliable data as possible”. To some extent, the data does make its calculations on people’s provided statistics but it apparently does not follow a thorough process.

According to a Pakistan Today article published on January 25, 2022, “the average monthly consumption expenditure of the third quintile of households in Pakistan was Rs30,475, or roughly $170.1. By definition then, this is approximately 44 million people (or 7.3 million households) spending a total of 1.2 billion.”

Moreover, Dawn's January 22 editorial read that "Gross national income has also increased to Rs59.3tr, with per capita income rising from $1,543 to $1,666."

It is yet to ascertain whether Pakistan is among the least costly country as basic commodities prices are still on the rise.