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概要：巨无霸指数这个指数由《经济学人》杂志于1986年推出，旨在通过比较全球各地麦当劳巨无霸汉堡的价格来评估不同国家货币的购买力。巨无霸指数的原理基于购买力平价理论，即假设在两个国家，用同一种货币购买同样的汉堡，若A国能买到更多的汉堡，那就说明A国的货币购买力相对较高。
The Big Mac index: where to buy a cheap hamburger
巨无霸指数:哪里可以买到便宜的汉堡
Meat-eaters may want to avoid Argentina
肉食者可能想避开阿根廷
August 7th 2024
McDonald’s owedits early success to
zealous pickiness. Other restaurant chains in the 1960s had similar rules for
food preparation and cleanliness. But none enforced them as rigorously,
according to “McDonald’s: Behind the Arches”, a history of the company by John
Love.
麦当劳将其早期的成功归功于顾客热情的挑剔。20世纪60年代的其他连锁餐厅对食物准备和清洁也有类似的规定，但是根据约翰·洛夫所著的McDonald’s: Behind the Arches一书，除了麦当劳，没有一家公司严格执行了这些规定。
Stores would test the fat content of beef with acid. Field agents would use hydrometersto check potatoes were not too watery. At a supplier’s plant in India, your correspondent once met a lab-coated technician all the way from Colombia whose job was to check the colour, smell, taste and “mouthfeel” of the French fries.
麦当劳门店会通过酸测试了解牛肉的脂肪含量。田间工作人员会用浮力计检查土豆是否水分太多。在印度的一家麦当劳供应商工厂，记者曾遇到一位从哥伦比亚远道而来、穿着实验室制服的技术员，他的工作是检查薯条的颜色、气味、味道和“口感”。
The result of this passion is uniformity: theBig Mac is much the same everywhere. But its price, interestingly, is not. A Big Mac in America costs $5.69. In the euro area, it costs the equivalent of $6.09. And in Taiwan, it costs only $2.28, less than half as much. This newspaper has been comparing the price of Big Macs since 1986. The aim is not (just) to find the best deal. It is also to test an important economic principle, known as purchasing-power parity.
这种热情挑剔的结果是产品的一致性：麦当劳巨无霸在世界任何地方都大同小异。但有趣的是，不同地方的价格却千差万别。在美国，一个巨无霸的价格是5.69美元。在欧元区，价格相当于6.09美元。而在台湾，只要2.28美元，还不到一半。自1986年以来，经济学人一直在从事巨无霸的价格比较。除了可以找到最便宜的麦当劳巨无霸，还可以检验重要的经济原则：购买力平价。
According to this principle, the value of a currency should reflect its buying power: its command over goods and services, including burgers. If something costs SKr50 in Sweden and the same thing costs $5 in America, then SKr10 should be worth $1. If they are worth less than that, the krona is “undervalued” against the dollar, according to our benchmark. A difficulty in testing this principle is finding exactly the same thing in both countries. But in the case of the Big Mac, that particular problem has been solved by the tasters and testers in the McDonald’s supply chain.
根据这一原则，一种货币的价值应该反映其购买力：包括汉堡在内的商品和服务。如果某样东西在瑞典值50瑞典克朗，而在美国值5美元，那么10瑞典克朗应该值1美元。根据我们的基准，如果汇率低于这个数字，那么克朗对美元就被“低估”了。检验这一原则的困难是很难在两个国家发现完全相同的东西。但是对巨无霸来说，麦当劳供应链中的品尝者和测试员解决了这个难题。
What does our latest comparison of burger prices show? A few currencies, including the British pound, Swedish krona and Canadian dollar, trade on currency markets for roughly what you would expect on the basis of their patty-purchasing power. Other currencies defy the basic principle. A minority are “overvalued”: they are worth more than is justified by their ability to buy a burger. If you convert a burger’s worth of dollars into Switzerland’s currency, you get only five Swiss francs. That’s enough to buy about 70% of a burger; what you might call a Mid Mac.
我们最新的汉堡价格对比显示了什么样的结果？英镑、瑞典克朗和加拿大元等货币在外汇市场上的交易价格大致相当于购买力所预期的价格。其他货币则不符合这一基本原则。少数货币被“高估”，价值超过了购买同一汉堡的能力。如果把一个汉堡价值的美元兑换成瑞士货币，你只能得到5瑞士法郎。这只能买70%左右的汉堡；你可能会称之为中无霸。
Rich countries are often expensive. A few highly productive, highly paid industries bid up wages throughout the job market. That lifts costs and prices in less productive sectors shielded from foreign competition. For this reason, our Big Mac index also comes in an “adjusted” version, which shows whether a currency is more out of whack than you would expect, given the country’sGDP per person. Even by this measure, Switzerland is expensive. And there is another anomaly: Argentina. Its peso is overvalued despite the fact that the country is not rich. You can buy over 5,300 pesos for $5.69 at the official exchange rate. That sounds like a lot until you realise that a Big Mac costs 6,100 pesos, up from 3,150 pesos just seven months earlier.
富裕国家的巨无霸往往更贵。一些生产率高、薪酬高的行业推高了整个就业市场的工资水平，从而提高了避免了外国竞争、生产率较低行业的成本和价格。出于这个原因，我们的巨无霸指数也有一个“经调整”版本，给定一个国家人均GDP的情况下，可以显示一种货币是否异于预期。即使按照这个标准，瑞士的巨无霸也很贵。还有另一个异常现象发生在阿根廷。尽管阿根廷并不富裕，但其货币比索被高估了。按照官方汇率，5.69美元可以兑换5300多比索。这听起来很多，可是巨无霸的价格已经从7个月前的3150比索涨到了6100比索。
These anomalies might simply reflect flaws in our index. Perhaps the price of a Big Mac is not representative of prices elsewhere in the economy. There is, after all, more to life than burgers. The World Bank leads a far bigger, more sophisticated effort to compare the prices of hundreds of similar products around the world. Do its results overturn ours?
这些异常可能反映了我们指数的缺陷。也许巨无霸的价格并不代表经济中其他商品的价格。毕竟，生活中的商品要多得多。世界银行曾经做过一项更大、更复杂的对比，比较了全球数百种类似产品的价格。其结果与我们的有什么不同吗？
Not really. The two sets of data have a correlation coefficient of almost 0.7, where 1 indicates perfect correlation. A handful of countries, including Uruguay, Norway and indeed Argentina, look expensive judging by burger prices, but undervalued on broader measures. Even in Argentina, though, the discrepancy is narrowing. After devaluing the peso by 50% in December, Javier Milei, Argentina’s outspoken president, has permitted it to fall by only 2% a month. That is not enough to offset the rise in consumer prices, which climbed by 4.6% in June. Hence anyone arriving in Argentina with dollars in their pocket and a rumbling in their stomach would probably seek to sell their greenbacks in the informal currency market, where $5.69 fetches roughly 7,600 pesos, enough to buy a burger with change to spare.
并没有很大的差别。两组数据的相关系数接近0.7，1表示完全相关。乌拉圭、挪威、阿根廷等少数国家汉堡价格很贵，但从更广泛的商品来看，价格却比较低。即使在阿根廷，两组数据的差距也在缩小。在去年12月比索贬值50%后，直言不讳的阿根廷总统Javier Milei只允许比索每月贬值2%。这不足以抵消商品价格的上涨幅度，6月份消费者价格上涨了4.6%。因此，在阿根廷，揣着美元、肚子里咕咕叫的人可能会在非正规货币市场出售手中的美元。在非正规货币市场，5.69美元可以兑换大约7600比索，足够买一个汉堡，还有零钱可找。
In any measure of a currency’s purchasing power, statisticians face a trade-off between breadth, consistency and timeliness. The World Bank’s calculations are far broader than ours. Yet they require vast statistical manpower and emerge only once every three years at best. The Big Mac index is the work of a handful of people and appears every six months. Our index, in short, purchases a lot of explanatory power for little cost. Despite all the attention it attracts, the Big Mac index is probably still undervalued.■
在衡量一种货币的购买力时，统计学家需要权衡广度、一致性和及时性。世界银行的统计远比我们的巨无霸指数广泛。然而，他们需要大量的统计人力，至多每三年才统计一次。而巨无霸指数是少数人就可以统计出来的，每六个月统计一次。简而言之，巨无霸指数以很低的成本获得了很强的解释力。尽管吸引了世人的关注，巨无霸指数的价值可能仍被低估了。■
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