[OC] Was 100 US-Dollar nach Wechselkursen in 138 Ländern wirklich wert sind

Source: World Bank PPP price levels (2024 round), divided by today’s market exchange rates. That gives each country’s price level relative to the US, which I inverted into „what $100 of US spending power actually buys locally“ — so $200 means things cost roughly half what they do at home. Travel advisory levels are from the US State Department, Global Affairs Canada and the German Federal Foreign Office.

Tool: Python standard library only, no dependencies. The SVG is written by hand (no plotting library), using the Equal Earth projection so country areas aren’t distorted the way Mercator would distort them. Data and map come from a site I built, wandergrade.com.

Method notes and two honest caveats:

The top of the ranking is dominated by recent currency devaluations — Egypt, Nigeria, Ethiopia — where the exchange rate has moved far faster than local prices. Those numbers are real but unstable, and they’ll look different in a year.

I excluded every country under a „Do Not Travel“ advisory. That’s partly editorial, but it also removes genuine artifacts: unfiltered, stale PPP data against redenominated currencies put Iran at $1,163 and made Sudan look pricier than Switzerland. 138 countries survive the filter; grey means no usable PPP data or no government rating.

Happy to share the script or the intermediate data if anyone wants to remix it.

r/PORTUGALCYKABLYAT, but it was pretty obvious given the map

Uruguay has been like these for ages. It only turned cheap in 2002 after a 100% deval but by 2005 that effect was gone. Brutal considering the real salaries are probably 1/3 of those in US

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Hmm this is crazy to think about. I have a friend in Egypt and want to get her a gift, her birthday is coming up. Shopping online I’m not really seeing that. I’m sure it’s different in person though…

Surely they need to be done at the 2024 (average?) FX conversion rates?

I appreciate that is going to be somewhat irrelevant given today’s rates are way different, but then again so is the ‚current spending power‘ in each country being based on 2024 pricing levels.