This paper reviews alternative approaches to measuring an economy''s cost competitiveness and proposes some new measures inspired by the economic theory of index numbers. The indices provide a theoretical benchmark for estimated real effective exchange rates, but differ from standard measures in...

Changes in product characteristics on the extensive margin are an important and hitherto neglected dimension of quality change. Standard techniques for quality-adjusting price indices cannot handle such changes satisfactorily, which leads to an economically and statistically significant bias in...