Consumer Goods Market Integration Among Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation Member Economies : A PPP-Based Analysis

This paper examines persistent behavior of deviations from purchasing power parity (PPP) constructed using consumer price indices and nominal exchange rates for APEC member economies over the period of 1981-2015. In particular, we ask if these deviations tend to converge to their long run equilibrium value. For this, we consider three different sample periods of 1981-2015, 1997-2015, and 1981-1996. We find that the panel unit root test rejects the unit root hypothesis that a deviation from PPP does not converge to its long run value for the period of 1997-2015 but does not reject it for the other two periods. We then investigate how quickly this deviation converges to its long run value and find that a half-life of a deviation from PPP is 5.7 quarters, which is much quicker than the estimates of 3 to 5 years reported by previous studies. This result is consistent with the argument that globalization and advancement in transportation and information technology significantly contribute to lowering trade barriers among APEC member economies