Salaries across a number of professions in Zurich, Geneva and Copenhagen are the highest in the world, while those in Nairobi, Manila and Mumbai are the lowest, according to a salary survey from Swiss bank UBS.

New York, the highest ranked US city in terms of wages, was in seventh place, followed by Los Angeles in tenth place. Canada’s Toronto and Montreal featured in fourteenth and fifteenth place respectively.

Given the UK government and media outcry over bankers’ pay which led to the implementation of the 50 per cent top earners tax rate earlier this year, you would be forgiven for imagining that London ranks as one of the highest paid cities in the world. Not so. Out of the 73 global cities on the list, London comes in at number 22, behind the likes of Helsinki, Amsterdam and Dublin, and narrowly beating Vienna.

According to the Swiss bank’s tri-annual study: Prices and Earnings, A Comparison of Purchasing Power Around The Globe 2011, gross wages of fourteen different types of workers, including bankers, in Northern and Central Europe, Australia and America topped the ranks of the 73 global cities, while firms based in Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America paid their employees the worst salaries.

UBS compiled the list by calculating the wage, social insurance contribution and working hours data of 14 occupations worldwide including banking, taking into account exchange rates and inflation and factoring in productivity gains.

UBS also ranked the 73 cities in order of how expensive they were to live in. Excluding rent, Oslo came out top, followed by Zurich, Geneva, Copenhagen and Stockholm. New York ranked fourteenth in relative terms, and was the most expensive in the US.

At the bottom of the relative price tables were Mumbai, Manila, Delhi, Nairobi and Cairo. Analysts collected the data through measuring the cost of a weighted shopping basket of 122 goods geared to Western European consumer habits.

The American cities included in the survey show lower price levels than in previous years, UBS said, a fact the firm’s economists attributed to the depreciation of the US dollar relative to other currencies. Venezuela’s capital city Caracas, on the other hand, suffered by this measure due to high inflation and a currency peg – making it relatively expensive.

Analysts used the basket to compare purchasing power in the top 73 cities. On this scale, even though Zurich is ranked as the world’s second most expensive city after Oslo, the Swiss city surprisingly tops the chart as where you can get most bang for your buck. Zurich is followed by Sydney, Luxembourg, Miami and Los Angeles. London ranked sixteenth. At the bottom of the purchasing power scale were Jakarta, Nairobi, Manila, Mexico City and Mumbai.

To compile this data UBS measured the net hourly wage divided by the cost of the entire basket of 122 goods.