Victoria 3: How To Increase Standard Of Living

Victoria 3 has a very diverse economic system controlled by several subsystems. The Standard of living is one of these subsystems, and you need to keep this score in check if you want your country to run efficiently. That brings us to this guide on Victoria 3 How to increase the standard of living, where we will discuss several methods of growing the standard of living and making sure the pops are happy.

Basic Need Of Population

In Victoria 3, all pops have a standard of living score ranging between 0 to 99, which depicts their ability to survive and thrive in society. The simplest way to increase the standard of living is by increasing your population’s wealth and/or increasing the money faster in Victoria 3 that your country owns to introduce subsidization.

Pops have a set of basic needs that they will spend their wages on in order to survive. After these needs are met, the leftover money contributes to the wealth of the population. There are 3 categories of occupations and wealth in Victoria 3, which determine how much the population is paid. These are the upper strata, middle strata, and lower strata. 

Your goal is to make sure that the pop is able to fulfill its needs and has enough money left over to contribute to the population’s wealth in order to increase the standard of living. The following are the methods to do so.

Managing Wages

The simplest and most direct method of increasing the standard of living is by increasing wages. Wages, in Victoria 3, are the primary source of income for Populus. Each building in the game pays its workers (the pops) depending on their strata, and the wages depend further on several other factors. 

Profit From Buildings

Basically, your building must be operating in profit for it to offer more wages to the pops working there. To make your building work in profit, you can reduce the prices of the input goods and increase the price of the produced goods.

Reducing the price of input goods will make it easier for the buildings to buy them, and hence the buildings would have to spend less. And in turn, it will have a greater profit margin and so increased wages for workers. Increasing the price of produced goods will make the building earn more and have the same effect as lowering the price of input goods.

Remember that pops would always prefer to work in places where they are offered more wages. So if a building offers more wages, more pops would be willing to work there, and this way, you can also attract more pops to a specific building.

Subsidization

You can also subsidize the building for it to offer more wages. Subsidization means that the national treasury will be covering some of the expenses of buying input goods for the building. If a building is subsidized, it will offer constant wages to the workers (depending on the average wage across the country) even if it is not operating in profit.

Keep in mind that this way, your GDP is threatened since you are paying for the wages from your country’s treasury. Only subsidize if you are rich and have some extra money to spend.

Competitive Market

Introducing a number of similar buildings will result in a competitive market. Which, in turn, will result in buildings competing with one another to attract workers. Hence, the building will offer more wages to the pops.

You can also try to invest in different types of industries instead of a few. Though lower strata jobs would not be affected this way, the average wages of all the buildings will increase, hence increasing the standard of living.

Wages Of Government & Military Employees

Although you have no direct control over the wages of common citizens, you can change the wages of government and military employees. You can increase their wages from the budget tab (one of the left buttons) and, as a result, increase the standard of living.

Healthy supply line

You can also increase the standard of living by having more trade lines and a stable supply of goods. This way, you are ensuring a surplus amount of goods in your country and minimizing their cost. This way, your pops will have to pay less for their basic needs, and hence they will have more money to contribute towards national income, increasing the standard of living.

You can check what goods your country lacks by studying the market and the prices of goods. And then you can either import those goods from the international market or produce them yourself.

Managing Taxes

Another way of increasing the standard of living in Victoria 3 is by lowering taxes on pops. If you reduce the tax imposed on your population, they will have more money to spend on other needs and, in some cases, be left with an increased amount of money. This amount of money will not only contribute to the wealth of the country but also increase the standard of living.

This method is but a double-edged sword since fewer taxes mean that the state will now have less income. Which means lesser money in the national treasury, which will not only affect the GDP, but you won’t have enough money to spend for other tasks.

Increasing Welfare Spendings

You can also effectively increase the standard of living in Victoria 3 by introducing welfare laws. Welfare spendings are a form of the wage for those pops who fall under the average wage of everyone in the country. Welfare payments enable these pops to meet their basic needs. You can enable welfare spending through welfare laws.

Another method of increasing welfare spending is by leveling up the country’s social security institution. Higher levels of Welfare will make the threshold for receiving welfare payments lower, increasing the number of pops that get this welfare spending. This will result in a substantial increase in your standard of living. The political power of those who receive these welfare payments is limited, so be wary of your decision.

The higher the welfare spending, the higher will be the standard of living. Poor Laws, Old Age Pensions, and Wage subsidies all increase the standard of living. But these laws require research in specific technology, and you cannot enact them unless you have that technology researched.

Summary

Increasing the Standard of living in Victoria 3 is important if you want to bring more life into your country and make it rich and powerful. An increased standard of living means fewer radicals. And so, if you don’t want a revolution brewing in your country and avoid getting kicked out of your own country, then you might want to consider giving more thought to increasing the standard of living of your pops.

In a nutshell, we can say that to increase the standard of living; we need to pay attention to the money our pops have. Keep in mind that Victoria 3 is a very complex game, and tampering with one thing will change another. Hence, you need to be careful and be sure not to go broke while increasing your standard of living.

That’s all from our side, be sure to share your thoughts in the comments.

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