Mapping the Big Mac Index

If you haven’t heard of it before, the Big Mac Index is a heuristic invented by The Economist to estimate purchasing power parity across economies. Looking past the numbers-to-numbers layer of exchange rates, the Big Mac Index is focused on measuring the cost of a single, standardized item (voila, the Big Mac!) across countries, and examining where the burger is relatively expensive and inexpensive compared to the rest of the world.

As the Economist just updated their dataset (published on GitHub) this January, I thought it would be fun to put together some maps to help visualize the data. I’ve embedded two charts below - one of Big Mac prices, adjusted to USD for comparability, and a second of global GDPs. I’ve found Brazil particularly interesting, as a relatively poor nation by GDP, but with first-world Big Mac prices. Take a peek!

Big Mac Prices in Dollars

Global GDPs