Wait, what? The third most expensive city in the world is in West Africa, and has 57% of its population living in extreme poverty? What happened there?
Living with a high standard of living in a poor city is not necessarily inexpensive. While labour and land will be significantly cheaper, importing western luxuries will likely be quite expensive, since there's far less of a market for those kinds of goods. And that's not to mention potential for corruption, extreme tarrifs etc (but I know nothing of Angola in particular, so I'll stay away from jumping to conclusions there).
Luanda has been notably expensive for a long time, for western lifestyles anyway. I think the main issue there is that the western contingent is small and very corporate.
