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(This article was first published on <strong><a href="http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2018/10/big-mac-index.html"> Revolutions</a></strong>, and kindly contributed to <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.r-bloggers.com/">R-bloggers)</a> </div>
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<p>The Economist's <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.economist.com/news/2018/07/11/the-big-mac-index" target="_blank">Big Mac Index</a> (also described on <a rel="nofollow" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Mac_Index" target="_blank">Wikipedia</a> if you're not a subscriber) was created (somewhat tongue-in-cheek) as a measure to compare the purchasing power of money in different countries. Since Big Macs are available just about everywhere in the world, the price of a Big Mac in Sweden — expressed in US dollars — gives an American traveler a sense of how much more expensive things will be in Stockholm. And comparing the price of a Big Mac in several countries converted to a single baseline currency is a measure of how over-valued (or undervalued) those other currencies are compared to that baseline.</p>
<p><a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.economist.com/news/2018/07/11/the-big-mac-index" target="_blank"><img border="0" alt="Bigmac" title="Bigmac" src="http://revolution-computing.typepad.com/.a/6a010534b1db25970b022ad372528e200c-800wi"></a></p>
<p>Since its inception in 1986, the Big Mac Index has been compiled and calculated manually, twice a year. But starting with the most recent published index (July 2018, shown above), the index is now calculated with R. This is the first example of a <a rel="nofollow" href="https://medium.economist.com/peeling-back-the-curtain-487bd3be0c47" target="_blank">new program at The Economist</a> to publish the data and methods behind its journalism, and here the data and code behind the Big Mac Index have been published as a <a rel="nofollow" href="https://github.com/TheEconomist/big-mac-data" target="_blank">Github repository</a>. The method behind the index is provided as a richly-commented <a rel="nofollow" href="https://github.com/TheEconomist/big-mac-data/blob/master/Big%20Mac%20data%20generator.ipynb" target="_blank">Jupyter Notebook</a>, where you can also find some additional charts and within-currency analyses not published in the main index.</p>
<p>The repository is published under an open MIT license, meaning you can remix the code to create a new index on prices of another international commodity, provided you can find the data. Find everything you need at the Github repository linked below.</p>
<p>Github (TheEconomist): <a rel="nofollow" href="https://github.com/TheEconomist/big-mac-data" target="_blank">Data and methodology for the Big Mac index</a></p>
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