What does the price of a bacon cheeseburger tell you about the state of the economy? Perhaps the Big Mac contains the “special sauce” to decoding the current consumer condition — or maybe it’s one of the many other oddball economic indicators that take into account everything from nail polish to men’s undies to corpses. [More]
burgernomics
The Big Mac Index: Globalization At Work
By 8.23.09
Sure, McDonald’s operates all over the world now, but that doesn’t mean that everyone can afford their products easily. As proof, The Economist has spent years updating its Big Mac Index, which uses the local price of the McD delicacy to estimate the purchasing power of consumers in about 120 countries. Recently, UBS cooked up its own twist on the index, calculating how many minutes the average person would need to work at their job in order to earn that precious, precious Big Mac. Predictably, a worker in Nairobi must work the longest—over two hours—while a worker in Chicago would only need to work 12 minutes.
