On 17 Aug 2004, at 14:20, Patrick W Gilmore wrote:
Things are not the same everywhere. Politics, infrastructure, labor, taxes, and a myriad of other factors make it not very useful to say "US is $30, AU is $300" and expect to draw any meaningful conclusion by the comparison - except, of course, that AU transit is more expensive than US transit.
I don't know, the Economist has been making allegedly useful comments about the relative prices of the Big Mac in different economies for a long time. http://www.economist.com/markets/Bigmac/Index.cfm I suppose a more direct analogy to the Big Mac Index would be to take some usefully-accurate measure of transit costs in each country, and use that to weight a comparison between other related commodities (cell phone calls? televisions? computers?) Of course, I am not an economist, and people who are tend to scare me. Joe