the amount should be enough to ensure that you maintain roughly the same living standards as where you come from.
This is something which has been mentionned several times in this thread but what does it mean? What are the living standards in the place I come from? What are the living standards in the place that YOU come from? What do you compare yourself to? Bankers? Lawyers? Factory workers? For a CEP, you can say that had it not been for CX, they probably would not be pilots but working in other industries. Is that what you compare living standards to? Doctors and lawyers have much better standards of living than many CEPs. Many CEPs actually gave up very lucrative jobs to be pilots believe it or not.
...or, perhaps we should compare to other flying jobs. Fair enough! So an expat working overseas, had they not joined CX might not be flying for a major airline. They might be furloughed or perhaps instead of command at CX they are F/Os on a widebody or perhaps captains on a small plane....or they might be living in a large house with a swimming pool in a nice part of town. Who knows? What does the CEP benchmark to? Well, if a CEP was to leave Cathay with a few years of widebody flying under their belt they could earn the same amount as what the expat is benchmarking themselves to. As someone else mentionned the 'housing' for a CEP should maybe be marketed as a retainer.
It is one thing for people to say a CEP should only get the living standards they would have in Hong Kong anyway, but how do you quantify it? There are some damned smart CEPs who would be living very well had it not been for Cathay's cadet scheme!