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INTERNATIONAL PRICE COMPARISONS BASED UPON INCOMPLETE DATA *
Author(s) -
Summers Robert
Publication year - 1973
Publication title -
review of income and wealth
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.024
H-Index - 57
eISSN - 1475-4991
pISSN - 0034-6586
DOI - 10.1111/j.1475-4991.1973.tb00870.x
Subject(s) - ranking (information retrieval) , dimension (graph theory) , representation (politics) , point (geometry) , economics , set (abstract data type) , developing country , presentation (obstetrics) , goods and services , relative price , econometrics , microeconomics , computer science , economy , mathematics , information retrieval , politics , economic growth , medicine , geometry , radiology , political science , pure mathematics , law , programming language
This paper is directed at the following question: given an incomplete set of price data relating to goods or services in some category of output for each of a number of different countries, what arithmetic should be performed on the prices to get a meaningful representation of the relative category price‐levels of the countries? In the course of developing an answer to the question, some broader matters are considered and illuminated. A comparison of category price‐levels for different countries is analogous to a commonly‐encountered problem in many areas, that of ranking ordinally or cardinally in one dimension a group of “entities”—persons, households, firms, industries, etc.—on the basis of sets of measurements associated with the individual entities. It is this point of view which dominates the following presentation.