We use international comparison data of Summers and Heston to trace the development of three regions in Western Europe: the countries currently outside the European Union (EEC), the EEC Center, and the EEC Periphery (Greece, Ireland, Portugal, and Spain). For each year during the period...

Data from the International Comparison Project are used to analyze the development of the real gross domestic products (GDPs) of the G-7 countries from 1950-1988. For the group as a whole, per capita GDP increased almost threefold in this period, whereas the inequality among the seven countries...

Using the Penn World Tables for 1950-1992, we summarize the gross domestic product development of 114 non-Communist countries by means of five regions: the North, the South (“down underâ€), tropical America plus southwest Asia, southeast Asia, and tropical Africa plus south-central...

Purchasing power parity-based data for gross domestic products are used to assess the affluence of the G-7 countries in the period 1885-1994. A simple Cobb-Douglas model is developed for the eligibility to this Group of Seven.

Australians are among the largest consumers of marijuana in the world, and estimates show that their expenditure on marijuana is approximately twice that on wine. In the present paper, the evolution of Australian marijuana prices over the last decade is analysed, and a decline in real terms by...

Australians are among the largest consumers of marijuana in the world, andestimates show that their expenditure on marijuana is about twice that on wine. In thispaper we analyse the evolution of marijuana prices in Australia and show that they havedeclined in real terms by almost 40 percent over...

Government agencies produce indexes that purport to measure international competitiveness. The most common version is the real effective exchange rate, which is some form of weighted average of the real exchange rates of the country's trading partners. Such indexes convey a false sense of...

This paper investigates several basic characteristics of food and agricultural prices across commodities, countries and time. The first part of the paper uses consumer prices across commodities and countries from the International Comparisons Program and finds that food has a distinct tendency...