Big Mac test exposes drawbacks of the job market in distributing wealth

New York

SOME 15 years ago, searching for a consistent way to compare wages of equivalent workers across the world, Orley Ashenfelter, an economics professor at Princeton University, came upon McDonald's.

The uniform, highly scripted production methods used throughout the McDonald's fast-food empire allowed Prof Ashenfelter to compare workers in far-flung countries doing virtually the same thing. The company also offered a natural index to measure the purchasing power of its wages around the world: the price of a Big Mac.

Some of his findings are d…