Burger economics

Re: “Prizes for fries”, (PostBag, Jan 4).

S Tsow posits that economists might be able to forego actual research and instead visit McDonald’s and price the fries in order to determine a nation’s economic status. The Economist magazine is way ahead of him having established the Big Mac Index in 1986.

From the Wikipedia entry: The Big Mac Index is a price index published by The Economist as an informal way of measuring the purchasing power parity (PPP) between two currencies and provides a test of the extent to which market exchange rates result in goods costing the same in different countries.

It “seeks to make exchange-rate theory a bit more digestible”.

MIKE NEWMAN