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globalEDGE offers a number of indices on our country pages. Topics of these indices range from the level of innovation performance of a country to an index that ranks countries based on the price of a McDonald’s Big Mac in different countries.
The goal of the Global Innovation Index (GII) is to measure multidimensional facets of innovation and provide options to help countries adopt policies to encourage output, productivity, and job growth. Two sub-indices are combined to make up the GII, the Innovation Input Sub-Index, and the Innovation Output Sub-Index. Both of these sub-indices are designed to capture all of the key elements of innovation. After a value has been found for both sub-indices the Output value of the sub-index is divided by the Input value of the sub-index to get what is called the Innovation Efficiency Ratio (IER). The IER is used to compare every country in the index and then subsequently rank each country.
The Big Mac Index seems at first to be very trivial, the valuation of currencies internationally. The idea behind the Big Mac Index is that a Big Mac is more or less consistent across every country where they exist, so if you measure the price of a Big Mac in US dollars in every country using currency market exchange rates you get a measure of how much a currency is over- or under-valued in against the dollar. This obviously isn’t a perfect measure of the value of a currency and is based on the acceptance of the theory of purchasing power parity but it does provide some insights to the value of currency across the globe.
Visit the indices pages on globalEDGE by going to any country page and accessing the “Indices” section of the upper left-hand side. Linked here is the Indices page for the United States.
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