The development of purchasing power parities as converters of national accounts aggregates to comparable volume figures is important for international economic comparisons. This study is primarily concerned with the aggregation of price relativities to basic heading level: that is, the level...

The bivariate relationship between real exchange rates and the real long-term interest rate differential has been investigated in a number of recent studies. By exchange-rate-equation standards, this specification does a relatively good job of tracking the historical movements in the...

This paper is one of four in this Working Paper Series, focusing on financial liberalisation, along with those of Kupiec, Miller and Weller, and Driscoll. It examines the extent to which international financial markets have become more integrated over the past decade. The finding that financial...

This paper provides estimates of labour productivity levels in OECD manufacturing, for 9 countries and 36 industrial sectors. It also provides an overview of some of the available evidence on cross-country productivity differences in the service sector. The paper uses industry-specific...

This paper describes the method of calculation of competitiveness indicators and effective exchange rates that are published half-yearly by the Secretariat in the Economic Outlook. This calculation is based on a double-weighting principle: the procedure calculates the relative importance of...

Exchange rates are relative prices of national currencies, and under a floating rate regime they may naturally be viewed as being determined by the interplay of supply and demand in foreign exchange markets. This proposition is uncontroversial, but it provides no more than a starting point for...

This paper analyses the impact of exchange rate regimes on real exchange rates, as defined by the relative price of nontradables to tradables in Argentina, Brazil, Chile (ABC) and Mexico from 1990 to 2002. The real exchange rate is determined in the long-run by the Balassa-Samuelson effect, but...

This report contains a new set of results on the levels of real per capita GDP and its main components in OECD countries in 1980, with estimates for later years upto 1984. Real per capita GDP is obtained by valuing the goods and services in different countries at a fixed set of prices, namely,...