Burgernomics

By THIS IS MONEY
Updated: 05:35 EST, 28 October 2009

The Daily Mail City team explains how ubiquitous fast-food outlet McDonalds has become a global economic indicator.

What?

It's economics with fries and a shake. Fast-food outlet McDonalds is so pervasive that its ubiquitous products have become a global economic indicator.

The withdrawal of the Golden Arches from Iceland is seen as a signal of the island's crash.

Tell me more

McDonalds has 32,000 restaurants around the world serving 58m customers a day. So the state of its business can tell analysts something about how economies are performing.

The Economist magazine has long published a Big Mac Index, an informal way of testing whether exchange rates reflect the respective costs of the two-pattie towers in a pair of countries.

Anyone else?

Swiss bank UBS has published a guide to how long it takes an average worker to earn the price of a Big Mac in 73 cities.

Apparently residents of Chicago, Toronto and Tokyo need to work only 12 minutes to buy one, whereas in Mexico City it takes over two hours of toil.

And Iceland?

The island will be withdrawn from Big Mac indices after McDonalds closes its three outlets there.

Iceland will join Albania, Armenia and Bosnia Herzegovina as European countries without a McDonald's.

Bad news for its economists, though perhaps not its nutritionists.

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