http://www.chicagotribune.com/travel/features/travelnews/sns-trvrail3-wk1,0,4697195.storyThe lesson: Buy Ruffles in Myanmar
Economics isn't dry when comparison-shopping around world
By Janet Eastman
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
A bottle of Corona costs $8 in India. In Vietnam, $8 will buy 10 bottles of that same beer.
A small bag of cheese-flavored Ruffles potato chips is $1.69 in Japan and only 8 cents in Myanmar. A plain white T-shirt costs $16 in a mall in Cape Town, South Africa, and a three-pack of Durex natural condoms averages about $2.02 around the world.
These figures are courtesy of college students who collected prices while traveling to 10 destinations with Semester at Sea, a shipboard study-abroad program.
For a price-indexing project in Humberto Barreto's Introduction to Macroeconomics Theory in the fall 2005 semester, the class priced 130 goods and services, including gasoline, phone cards and other necessities for travelers. But because twentysomethings were conducting the study, not Alan Greenspan, they tossed in items rarely examined by economists, including rum, Snickers candy bars and Neutrogena oil-free acne wash.
The project was based on the Economist magazine's Big Mac index, Barreto says. "Burgernomics" compares the cost of a McDonald's Big Mac around the world, with prices converted to U.S. dollars. The exchange rate shows if a country's currency is under- or overvalued based on purchasing-power parity.
*****************8
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
