Publication: Purchasing Power Parities and the Size of World Economies: Results from the 2017 International Comparison Program
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2020-05-19
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2020-04-17
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The International Comparison Program (ICP) is a worldwide statistical initiative led by the World Bank under the auspices of the United Nations Statistical Commission. It produces comparable price and volume measures of gross domestic product (GDP) and its expenditure aggregates across economies. Through a partnership with international, regional, sub-regional and national agencies, the ICP collects price data and GDP expenditures to estimate purchasing power parities (PPPs) for the world’s economies. The report provides ICP results for the benchmark year 2017 and revised results for earlier years. ICP data are used for socio-economic analyses by researchers, academics, policy makers at the national and international levels, and by organizations such as the European Union, the International Monetary Fund, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, the United Nations, and the World Bank. Notably, PPPs and ICP data are used in indicators monitoring progress towards eight goals of the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the World Bank’s international poverty lines, and the construction of the Human Development Index by the United Nations, among others. The use of PPPs continues to grow and the ICP website (icp.worldbank.org) lists many applications of the data by the development community, academia, media and others.
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“World Bank. 2020. Purchasing Power Parities and the Size of World Economies: Results from the 2017 International Comparison Program. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/33623 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
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Publication Purchasing Power Parities and Real Expenditures of World Economics : A Comprehensive Report of the 2011 International Comparison Program(Washington, DC, 2015)The International Comparison Program (ICP) is a large and highly complex worldwide statistical program conducted under the charter of the United Nations Statistical Commission (UNSC). The ICP is designed to provide globally comparable economic aggregates in national accounts that can be used by individual researchers, analysts, and policy makers at the national and international levels and by international organizations such as the European Union, International Monetary Fund, Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), United Nations, and World Bank. Over its lifetime, the ICP has become the principal source of data on the purchasing power parities (PPPs) of currencies, measures of real per capita income, and measures of real gross domestic product (GDP) and its main components from the expenditure side, including private consumption, government expenditures, and gross fixed capital formation. Indeed, since its inception in 1970, successive rounds of the ICP have produced valuable data for international economic analyses of economic growth and the catch-up and convergence of incomes among nations; productivity levels and trends; analyses of systematic patterns in national price levels and trends; construction of the Human Development Index by the United Nations; measures of regional and global inequality in incomes and consumption; and estimates of the incidence of absolute poverty using World Bank developed yardsticks such as the US$1 a day and $2 a day poverty lines.Publication Preferences, Purchasing Power Parity, and Inequality(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-08)This paper makes analytical, methodological and empirical contributions to the literature on purchasing power parity. Purchasing power parities are required in a host of cross-country welfare comparisons, such as poverty rates and gross domestic product. The subject has recently generated much interest in the wake of the release of the final results of the 2011 International Comparison Program. This paper introduces a preference-based analytical framework that departs from the conventional Balassa-Samuelson framework in deriving empirically verifiable propositions on the link between purchasing power parity and exchange rates, and between purchasing power parity and inequality. The paper also provides an alternative methodology for calculating purchasing power parities that are benchmarked against the 2011 International Comparison Program purchasing power parities. As this study shows, the alternative methodology is capable of easy implementation on readily available data sets. The benchmarking exercise suggests that the 2011 International Comparison Program generally understates purchasing power parity and overstates gross domestic product, and that the purchasing power parities vary across expenditure percentiles. The study reports regional variation in the direction of the difference between the two purchasing power parities. The empirical evidence is supportive of the positive association between inequality and purchasing power parity derived in the paper.Publication Purchasing Power Parities for Policy Making(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-06-10)The International Comparison Program (ICP) is a worldwide statistical initiative led by the World Bank under the auspices of the United Nations Statistical Commission. It produces comparable price and volume measures of gross domestic product (GDP) and its expenditure aggregates across economies. Through a partnership with international, regional, sub-regional and national agencies, the ICP collects price data and GDP expenditures to estimate purchasing power parities (PPPs) for the world’s economies. 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The indicators are produced by the World Bank and other organizations including Eurostat, the Food and Agriculture Organization, the International Energy Agency, the International Labour Organization, the International Monetary Fund, the International Telecommunication Union, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the United Nations Development Program, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, the World Economic Forum, and the World Health Organization. The guide also highlights notable uses of underlying ICP data on food prices and on public sector wages, as well as the wealth of data from the ICP database itself, such as price levels, real expenditures, and expenditure shares for aggregates below GDP for each economy. In addition, the guide includes a comprehensive chapter on the uses and limitations of PPPs and analyses for which they are appropriate, as well as a technical note outlining the concepts and definitions of terms used. A web-based version (https://www.worldbank.org/en/programs/icp/brief/PPPs-for-Policy ) is also available, and more information can be found on icp.worldbank.org.Publication Poverty-Specific Purchasing Power Parities in Africa(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2017-07)The paper revisits the issue of poverty-specific purchasing power parities (PPPs), using the most recent (2011) International Comparison Program (ICP) results. The World Bank's global poverty count uses a common international poverty line -- currently $1.90 at 2011 international prices—based on the ICP PPPs for consumption. The use of these PPPs is often criticized for two reasons. First, the ICP PPPs are based on patterns of aggregate household consumption, not the consumption of the poor. Second, the basket of goods and services used for collecting prices for the ICP is not poverty specific. On the first issue, using data from 28 African countries, the paper concludes that the poverty-specific PPPs estimated with household expenditure survey weights are very similar to the ICP PPPs. On the second issue, poverty-specific PPPs were estimated after removing items deemed to be irrelevant for the poor. The overall effect of removing these items from consumption PPPs is shown to be negligible.Publication Global Purchasing Power Parities and Real Expenditures : 2005 International Comparison Program(Washington, DC, 2008)The International Comparison Program (ICP) is a worldwide statistical initiative to collect comparative price data and estimate purchasing power parities (PPPs) of the world's economies. Using PPPs instead of market exchange rates to convert currencies makes it possible to compare the output of economies and the welfare of their inhabitants in real terms (that is, controlling for differences in price levels). This report brings together the results of two separate PPP programs. The first is the global ICP program conducted by the ICP global office within the World Bank, which provided overall coordination for the collection of data and calculation of PPPs in more than 100 (mostly developing) economies. The program was organized into five geographic areas: Africa, Asia-Pacific, Commonwealth of Independent States, South America, and Western Asia. Regional agencies took the lead in coordinating the work in the five regions. In parallel, the Statistical Office of the European Communities (Eurostat) and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) conducted their 2005 PPP program, which comprised 46 economies. Eurostat covered 37 economies: the 25 European Union (EU) member states; the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) economies (Iceland, Norway, and Switzerland); and Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Romania, Serbia, and Turkey. The OECD part of the program included 9 other economies: Australia, Canada, Israel, Japan, the Republic of Korea, Mexico, New Zealand, the Russian Federation, and the United States. The main reasons for conducting the ICP on a regional basis are that the products to be priced are more homogeneous within regions, the expenditure patterns are likely to be more similar, and language differences are reduced. Moreover, dividing the ICP organization among a number of regional offices in relatively close proximity to the economies they are coordinating provides operational benefits.
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