The Big-Mac Index! Now in the open!
In case you haven't heard of the Big-Mac index - it was invented by The Economist as a way of measuring "Purchasing Power Parity" - think "What does it take to buy the same item in each country" - i.e., a way of seeing how far off the exchange rate was from the "internal rate" for a country.
As they put it
As they put it
Burgernomics was never intended as a precise gauge of currency misalignment, merely a tool to make exchange-rate theory more digestible. Yet the Big Mac index has become a global standard, included in several economic textbooks and the subject of at least 20 academic studies. For those who take their fast food more seriously, we have also calculated a gourmet version of the index.
This adjusted index addresses the criticism that you would expect average burger prices to be cheaper in poor countries than in rich ones because labour costs are lower. PPP signals where exchange rates should be heading in the long run, as a country like China gets richer, but it says little about today's equilibrium rate. The relationship between prices and GDP per person may be a better guide to the current fair value of a currency. The adjusted index uses the “line of best fit” between Big Mac prices and GDP per person for 48 countries (plus the euro area). The difference between the price predicted by the red line for each country, given its income per person, and its actual price gives a supersized measure of currency under- and over-valuation.And here is the actual Visualization (below. image up top)
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