Earlier this year The Economist published its latest Big Mac index. Conceived 16 years ago as a superficial guide to whether national currencies were trading at their correct “purchasing power”, the hamburger standard has achieved more notoriety than any other currency forecaster. By comparing the dollar price of a Big Mac across 120 currencies to that of the American equivalent, a rough guide to the under- or overvaluation of currencies is constructed. While purists protest that the index is imperfect, it has, over the long run, proven a good indicator of future exchange rate movements.

What this signals for South Africa`s emerging market is that, sooner or later, the local currency is bound to strengthen. Of course it is somewhat strange that we place so much faith in the predictive power of a burger franchise. At the same time it does constitute one of the most visible symbols of the increasingly globalised economy of which even we in Africa are part.