Price of World Cup stickers in Brazil is world's lowest

Sao Paulo, April 26 (IANS) The price people in Brazil must pay to fill up their 2018 FIFA World Cup Panini albums with stickers of all the teams' players is the lowest in the world, according to a study by the Brazilian unit of Spain's Banco Santander.

The cost of a packet of five stickers in Brazil is equivalent to $0.59, compared with $1.80 in the most expensive country, Switzerland, the report says, according to Efe.

Since 682 different stickers must be collected to fill up one World Cup album, the cost of doing so (not including repeats) would be just $80.47 in Brazil but $245.52 in Switzerland.

Of the nearly 100 countries where the albums and stickers are sold, the second-to fifth-most expensive are Hungary ($1.48 per packet), Poland ($1.40), Romania ($1.38) and Russia ($1.35), which will host football's premier event starting June 14.

The cost of a packet of stickers in the eurozone is equivalent to $1.11, slightly more than in the US, where the price is $1.

"Generally speaking, the stickers are cheapest in the Latin American countries and most expensive in Europe, especially in Eastern Europe considering people's income levels," the Banco Santander Brasil study, published Tuesday, says.

The second- to fifth-lowest prices are all found in Latin America: Ecuador ($0.70 per packet), Argentina ($0.74), Mexico ($0.75), Chile ($0.75) and Colombia ($0.76).

Economist Luciano Sobral said in the study that it was inspired by The Economist magazine's Big Mac Index, which uses the price of a McDonald's Big Mac hamburger in different countries to measure people's purchasing power in different countries.

Like the world-famous hamburger, the World Cup stickers sold since 1970 by Italian publishing company Panini "are highly standardised and globalised, and thus in theory can be useful in measuring purchasing power parity" worldwide, he said.