Cross-country comparisons of wage rates: the Big Mac index

From VoxEU.org comes this audio of an interview in which Orley Ashenfelter of Princeton University talks to Romesh Vaitilingam about his research comparing wage rates for workers in identical jobs across countries, for which he has collected data from branches of McDonald’s, the fast food restaurant chain, in North and South America, Western and Eastern Europe and the rising economies of Asia.