Koreans must work 42 minutes to buy Big Mac

With the current minimum wage, South Koreans need to work 42 minutes to earn a Big Mac burger, a study showed.

The research, conducted by the market research firm ConvergEx Group, compared countries’ minimum wages by using the price of a Big Mac, the signature burger of fast-food giant McDonald’s, as an indicator. 

It takes 42 minutes of work at South Korea’s current rate of 4,860 won ($4.35) to afford the burger, according to the data. 

Australia has the highest minimum wage, at $16.88, which requires an Australian laborer to work 18 minutes to earn the burger. Workers both in New Zealand and France have to work 22 minutes.

Sierra Leone’s minimum wage was bottom among other countries at 3 cents per hour, requiring 136 hours of work for the burger.

“We wanted to see where the U.S. minimum wage ranked on an international scale, so we took a fairly well-known indicator -- the Big Mac Index -- and compared burger prices to minimum wages in different countries,” a strategist of the research team said.

The “Big Mac Index,” invented by economists in 1986, is a tool for measuring countries’ relative prices after adjusting for the nominal exchange rate between countries’ currencies that differ from country to country.

By Im Woo-jung, Intern reporter
(iwj@heraldcorp.com)