By Marc Lostracco

Reading about world economies is important, but it can also be dry and boring, which is why the latest Big Mac Index, published by the Economist, caught our eye. The annual Index, which measures “purchasing power parities” around the world, has been around since 1986, but UBS Wealth Management Research has helped shape the more current incarnations. Basically, it estimates how much time an average wage earner must work to make enough money to afford a Big Mac, taking into account local currencies and wages and weighted across fourteen professions and seventy-three international cities.
It turns out that Torontonians—along with workers in Tokyo and Chicago—are first in line at the global McDonald’s, with only twelve minutes elapsed before enough coin is earned to buy the hamburger. Though the global average is about thirty-six minutes, Nairobi bottoms out at almost one-hundred-sixty minutes, followed by Jakarta and Mexico City, where the average labourer has to toil for more than two hours to afford the 704-calorie sandwich.
But no matter what the chart shows, it’s still best to be the ones actually selling the Big Macs: McDonald’s unloads the things at an annual rate of about seventeen per second in the U.S. alone—and you wonder why you’re fat.
Thanks to Nik Broukhanski for the tip!