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Cost of Living

Adds Cost of Living simulation. Cost of Living and Wages will feed each other, dragging Productivity down and thus harming the economy. It's up to you how to tackle it since there are various factors ranging from wages to prices of raw materials.

Note) This mod is likely to make the game more difficult by hurting economic growth. Also, as wages and CoL reinforce each other, it could be hard to control spiraling stats (won't explode to 100% though). Lastly, I highly recommend not to pledge lower Cost of Living in electioneering. To achieve below-30% CoL, you definitely need to either crash wages or use lots of policies.

You can also try a sub-mod: Cost of Living - Urban Density

Related Forum Post: Positech Forum[forums.positech.co.uk]

More Detailed Description:
This mod adds Cost of Living to achieve 3 things - 1) give an important role to Inflation, 2) make Wages stickier & trickier to control, and 3) balance the benefits of Import Tariffs. A yet-to-be-tapped feature of CoL simulation is allowing fair depiction of demand-driven stimulus measures.

Cost of Living has effectively 3 major input links. The first one is GDP-Currency Strength-Oil Price. Low GDP will make it harder to procure raw materials needed by weakening the currency strength. You have to tackle this by either boosting the GDP or meddling with supply-demand of oil. The second one is a circular link - Wages-Inflation-CoL-Wages. If your country has high wage level for any reasons, Inflation and Cost of Living will rise as consumption (no sim just a term :P) goes up. And, high price level will, again, feed wages. Since wages play a major role in Productivity, anything that boosts wages/inflation/CoL will eventually lead to higher wages and lower GDP. The last one is Import Tariff-International Trade. Tariffs will have negative impacts of directly pushing import prices up and reducing international trade, which again makes it harder to get needed goods from global market.

With this mod enabled, 5~6%p rise in Inflation or 10%p rise in Cost of Living is expected to damage Productivity by 3%p and GDP by 1%p. Therefore, this mod will allow quite fair depiction of demand-driven stimulus policies. Let's say there's a stimulus package that boosts GDP by 2% and inflation by 10%. It will improve GDP at first for sure. But as inflation feeds Cost of Living and then Wages, Productivity will fall, hurting GDP by 1.7~2% (expected). The stimulus, in a long run, ends up boosting Inflation only to have minimal impacts on GDP. I've nerfed GDP boosts of QE and Helicopter Money as examples of this. They still have unique roles (Business Confidence / Poverty) though.

Future Ideas:

• anti-inflation measures or mechanics (interest rates maybe? as policy or simulation)
  
• add stimulus effects (GDP&Inflation) to big public spending policies
  
• deal with the issues of taxation & healthcare impacts on inflation/CoL
  
• add unique modifiers on CoL when playing countries with high population density (would be nice if whole real estate things could be revisited but that's another huge topic)
  
• add Cost of Living Crisis as a negative situation under low wage & high CoL
  
• maybe add direct price control policies?

*any feedback on either gameplay experiences or economic modeling will be welcomed. tell me in the comments section if you want a discussion thread for it.