In August, while sharing what I'd seen in Taiwan, I posted a photo of a Taiwanese job ad on Douyin and Xiaohongshu (two of China's biggest social apps). The comments filled up fast: "Prices in Taiwan are high too." "Converted to yuan, it's not much." "The same money goes further on the mainland."
I like working with data, so I started wondering: if you wanted to actually answer comments like these, what numbers would you use?
Average wages get pulled up by a few people. If you average my wealth with Elon Musk's, I'm a billionaire too, and my bank balance doesn't change by a cent. Average wages work the same way. A small number of high earners can drag the figure up, and it tells you little about what ordinary people earn, especially those at the bottom.
A monthly salary is a total. It ignores hours. Take two people on the same monthly pay: one works 8 hours a day, the other 12. The second earns only two-thirds as much per hour. If you want a fair comparison, count by the hour.
Whether money "goes further" depends on what it buys, not what it's worth in yuan. An exchange rate tells you what a sum is worth in another currency. It doesn't tell you how much it buys locally. To compare how far money goes, you need something that's sold everywhere and is nearly identical everywhere, and use it as a ruler.
That's when I thought of the Big Mac index. The Economist launched it in 1986, half as a joke: compare the price of a McDonald's Big Mac around the world to gauge what currencies are really worth (purchasing power parity, or PPP).
Was there something similar for wages? A quick search said yes. In a 2001 paper, Cross-country Comparisons of Wage Rates: The Big Mac Index, the economists Orley Ashenfelter and Štěpán Jurajda collected the hourly wages of McDonald's crew in 27 countries and divided them by the local Big Mac price: how many Big Macs an hour of work buys. They later named this measure BMPH, Big Macs Per Hour.
The catch is that McDonald's crew wages are hard to find in public sources, and there's no way to check them one by one. So I changed the measure: I used each place's statutory hourly minimum wage instead. The minimum wage is a legal floor, every country publishes it officially, and it's also the closest match to the kind of job in that ad. The trade-off is that the comparison no longer holds the job constant, only the product.
That gets around the problems above. It uses the legal floor, so averages can't inflate it. It counts by the hour, so working hours don't skew it. And wages and prices are both in local currency, so no exchange rate is needed, and "prices in Taiwan are high too" is already built into the Big Mac price.
So I collected data for 43 economies. Big Mac prices come from The Economist's July 2026 edition, and minimum wages are the rates in force on 1 July 2026, each with a source. Here's what came out:
Of the 43 economies, Australia comes out on top: an hour of minimum wage buys 3.11 Big Macs. At the bottom, in Islamabad, Pakistan, it buys 0.18. Taiwan ranks 3rd and Shanghai 17th.
Taiwan's minimum wage is NT$196 an hour and a Big Mac costs NT$78, so an hour of minimum-wage work buys 2.51 Big Macs.
Shanghai's minimum wage is ¥25 an hour and a Big Mac costs ¥26.50, so an hour buys 0.94 Big Macs.
Two notes here. First, minimum wages on the mainland vary by city, and Shanghai is in the highest tier, so other cities would come out lower. Second, ¥25 is Shanghai's rate for part-time, hourly work. Using the full-time monthly minimum of ¥2,740 instead, and converting at the national standard of 174 paid hours a month, the hourly wage is about ¥15.75, which buys about 0.59 Big Macs. Measured the same way (a monthly minimum of NT$29,500, converted at a 40-hour week), Taiwan comes to about 2.18. (Shanghai's monthly minimum excludes the employee's own social insurance and housing fund contributions, so actual pre-tax pay is a bit higher.)
The method has limits, of course. A Big Mac doesn't mean the same thing everywhere: in some countries it's cheap fast food, in others a proper meal out. And the minimum wage isn't what most people actually take home. So this doesn't answer "where is life better". It answers "to buy the same thing, how long does someone on the minimum wage have to work".
Back to the question I started with. On the part-time hourly rate, an hour of minimum wage in Taiwan buys about 2.7 times as many Big Macs as in Shanghai. On the full-time monthly rate, the gap is about 3.7 times. "Converted to yuan, it's not much" only looks at the exchange rate and ignores prices on each side. Once prices are counted, the conclusion flips.