The purpose of this paper is to present, and to explain the construction of, a set of price indexes relating to international trade in manufactured goods. These include: 1. Indexes of export prices for the U.S., Germany, and Japan, based on their weights, and indexes of competitors' prices for...

This paper reviews the International Comparison Program (ICP), a worldwide effort to produce international comparisons of real GDP and its components and purchasing power parities of currencies (PPPs). The robustness of results and future work are considered.<br><br>A generous estimate of margins of...

The share of U.S. multinational firms in world exports of manufactures has remained almost constant at about 17 per cent for the last 20 years while that of the U.S. as a country has declined substantially. The composition of world manufactured exports shifted toward high-technology or...

Given the level of its production in the U.S., a firm that produces more abroad tends to have fewer employees in the U.S. and to pay slightly higher salaries and wages to them. The most likely explanation seems to be that the larger a firm's foreign production, the greater its ability to...

Direct investment in foreign countries by U.S. goods industries represents a response to differences in labor costs to a much greater extent than the more rapidly growing investment by service industries. The latter seem to be less able to allocate different types of production to different...

This paper examines changes in national price levels and prices of tradables and nontradables and relates them to changes in variables found earlier to be associated with price level differences among countries. Across countries, national price levels increase systematically with the level of a...

Multinational firms have played an important role in leading the developing countries into world markets. Multinationals from the United States, Japan and Sweden have all increased their shares of LDC exports of manufactures since the mid-1960s or mid-1970s. Their importance was particularly...

The belief that the U.S. is a nation of spendthrifts, unwilling to pro- vide for the future, rests on observations of particular narrow definitions of capital formation, on the use of nominal values that ignore inter- national differences in the relative prices of capital goods, and on...

The share in world exports of manufactured goods of U.S. multinational firms, including their majority-owned overseas affiliates, has been nearly stable since 1966. This stability, over a period in which the export share of the U.S. as a geographical entity was declining for the most part,...

This paper attempts to find norms for long-run national price levels,and therefore, by implication, for exchange rates, that are superior to those implied by the absolute or relative versions of purchasing power parity theory. The structural variables we have found to determine these price...