The Big Mac Index, introduced by The Economist magazine more than two decades ago, claims to provide the quot;true valuequot; of a large number of currencies. This paper assesses the economic value of this index. We show that (i) the index suffers from a substantial bias; (ii) once the bias is...

This paper analyses the world demand for fibers using the system-wide approach with three dimension—product X space X time. We investigate to what extent differences in international consumption patterns of fibers can be explained by differences in incomes and prices faced by different...

Government agencies produce indexes that purport to measure international competitiveness. The most common version is the real effective exchange rate, which is some form of weighted average of the real exchange rates of the country's trading partners. Such indexes convey a false sense of...

The stochastic approach to index numbers has been successfully applied to the estimation of inflation, the world interest rate and international competitiveness. One distinct advantage of this approach is that it provides the whole distribution of the index, not simply one value. In this...

Building on purchasing power parity theory, this paper proposes a new approach to forecasting exchange rates using the Big Mac data from The Economist magazine. Our approach is attractive in three aspects. Firstly, it uses easily-available Big Mac prices as input. These prices avoid several...

Survey of literature on PPP up to July 2000. Includes a geogetric analysis of PPP theory, issues related to deviations from parity and an examination of empirical evidence on PPP.