freebird5825
Give me a museum and I'll fill it. (Picasso) Give me a forum ...
Now I've seen it all...
This is actually a "real" index, using a universally recognized product as the basis of comparison.
In any case, there is a useful document (2009 version of the UBS survey of purchasing power globally) linked in the article at Burgernomics: What's a Big Mac worth? - MSN Money
Excerpt: The Big Mac Index, created by The Economist, has long been used as a way to illustrate the shifts in purchasing power of different currencies. A McDonald's Big Mac sandwich that costs $3.54 in New York, for example, costs 1,550 pesos in Chile.
Investment bank UBS takes the concept further, translating each currency into units of work. Thus a Big Mac that takes 14 minutes to earn in New York takes nearly an hour in Budapest. (The hourly wage used for New York was $19, though of course that shifts constantly with exchange rates.)
The 2009 version of the UBS survey (.pdf file) adds another good with near-universal familiarity: The iPod.
This is actually a "real" index, using a universally recognized product as the basis of comparison.
In any case, there is a useful document (2009 version of the UBS survey of purchasing power globally) linked in the article at Burgernomics: What's a Big Mac worth? - MSN Money
Excerpt: The Big Mac Index, created by The Economist, has long been used as a way to illustrate the shifts in purchasing power of different currencies. A McDonald's Big Mac sandwich that costs $3.54 in New York, for example, costs 1,550 pesos in Chile.
Investment bank UBS takes the concept further, translating each currency into units of work. Thus a Big Mac that takes 14 minutes to earn in New York takes nearly an hour in Budapest. (The hourly wage used for New York was $19, though of course that shifts constantly with exchange rates.)
The 2009 version of the UBS survey (.pdf file) adds another good with near-universal familiarity: The iPod.