[OC] What $100 is really worth in 138 countries, after exchange rates

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

That’s a good real-world example of exactly the caveat above — Uruguay’s 2002 crisis inflated its “value” on paper for a couple years, then local prices caught up. Worth remembering these snapshots decay.