While it is widely agreed that Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) holds as a long-runconcept the specific dynamic driving the process is largely build upon a priori economicbelief rather than a thorough statistical modeling procedure. The two prevailing timeseries models, i.e. the exponential smooth...

We analyze the cross-national distribution of GDP per capita and its evolutionfrom 1970 to 2003. We argue that peaks are not a suitable measure for distinctgrowth regimes, because the number of peaks is not invariant under strictlymonotonic transformations of the data (e.g. original vs. log...