Talk:Purchasing power parity/Archive 1

Archive 1

VOTE!! - HDI in Infobox#Countries|country infobox/template?

The Human Development Index (HDI) is a standard UN measure/rank of how developed a country is or is not. It is a composite index based on GDP per capita (PPP), literacy, life expectancy, and school enrollment. However, as it is a composite index/rank, some may challenge its usefulness or applicability as information.

Thus, the following question is put to a vote:

Should any, some, or all of the following be included in the Wikipedia Infobox#Countries|country infobox/template:

(1) Human Development Index (HDI) for applicable countries, with year;

(2) Rank of country’s HDI;

(3) Category of country’s HDI (high, medium, or low)?

YES / NO / UNDECIDED/ABSTAIN - vote here

Thanks!

E Pluribus Anthony 01:52, 20 September 2005 (UTC)

I don't get...

this:

"It takes into account that some goods like real estate, services (e.g. medical services) and heavy items are non-traded, and thus not reflected in the exchange rate."

Why should this affect PPP?

The basic idea is that traded goods (think iPods) have a similar price everywhere. Nontraded goods do not: you might get a haircut for 50 cents in some countries; you might as well buy a mansion for a few thousand Dollars, if labour costs and real estate is cheap enough. Your x-thousand Dollars might buy that much more goods and services in that other country.

Secondly, maybe a nice easy definition should happen above the ToC, like "The PPP measures better how much an individual can buy in terms of an international measure (usually dollars), since goods and services in some countries have different prices than others. It is often considered a better measure of standard of living than just national income." Okay it's similar to the definition, but I found it quite technical if someone just looks up what 'PPP' means. --Mark Lewis 20:14, 3 Feb 2005 (UTC)

I just rewrote the intro, using some of what you wrote. I'm trying to keep it clear that PPP is, fundamentally, a way of comparing two currencies. Its purpose is, as far as I know, always to compare GDP or per capita GDP, but that's not what it is. OK, I'm pedantic ;-) Anyway, the truth is that the article needs a lot of rewriting. Parts of it are overly technical or poorly explained, and I'm not even sure that some parts are correct. Unfortunately, my knowledge of the subject is a bit weak. I listed it on Wikipedia:The Business and Economics Forum as needing attention; hopefully someone can fix it eventually. Isomorphic 22:41, 3 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for such a rapid reply, and I think the intro now provides a nice easy quick reference for someone simply looking for a non-technical definition. --Mark Lewis 17:53, 4 Feb 2005 (UTC)

More on the intro: This sentence is confusing: "...the purchasing power parity hypothesis suggests that the long run equilibrium value is that which yields purchasing power parity." Is what you mean to say the same as this sentence: "It asserts that exchange rates are in equilibrium when the domestic purchasing power of currencies are the same." That sentence I get. It can be found here: http://www.economyprofessor.com/economictheories/purchasing-power-parity.php. Cellulator 17:42, 28 March 2006 (UTC)

Actual PPP values?

Hi, I think it would be very interesting to give actual values of PPP exchange rates. For example, to compare salaries in various countries, the PPP exchange rate is more relevant than the real one. Can these values be found anywhere? (apart from computing them by using the two different GDP values given in the wikipedia lists) laug 20:55, 19 August 2006 (UTC)

This article reeks bias

The aricle basically dismisses the CIA worldfactbooks use of PPP to measure economy as invalid. Excuse me, but is some wikipedia highschool student going to make the final call wether the CIA factbook methodology is flawed or not? I think not. China is also mentioned several times, claimed as "flawed" once again for asserting that China is the worlds second largest economy by PPP. Once again, can you leave personal opinion and research behind, because no one cares. The fact is the CIAWF and many other sources do equate GDP PPP value with the actual economic power, and they have a much better bases of doing so than someone coming out and claiming the whole proceedure to be flawed. There are also obvious signs of vandalism in the article. Seriously, this needs to be rewritten from almost scrap without the China, PPP, and CIAWF hating bias. Editor18 08:02, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

==============

According to the The Economist's World in Figures (2007 Edition), Japan's GDP per capta is US$4,622 in nominal terms, and US$3,737 in Purchasing Power Parity. The figures in the article indicate a huge discrepancy.

Merger

Shouldn't there be a merger with Purchasing price parity? They seem to be the same thing to me. Purchasing POWER parity, also gets more hits on google. 71.250.1.198 15:04, 20 May 2006 (UTC)

Merged -- Petri Krohn 03:19, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

Are property prices included in PPP?

...or rather in the market baskets typically used to calculate it (by the CIA, etc.)? Thomas Ash 13:16, 19 April 2007 (UTC)

Taxes

I wonder whether the prices include taxes, VAT in particular, or not. In other words, could a country with a high VAT rank better simply by lowering the tax?Tomppeli 08:01, 30 April 2007 (UTC)

Ipod section and Africa section

These two sections don't really add anything to the article. Right? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 167.219.0.140 (talk) 12:38, 4 September 2007 (UTC)

Ipod section is old, maybe it should be rewritten to reflect that. Also the Foxconn factory in Brazil closed (I think) see this zdnet article

relative PPP

people talking about relative PPP in the short term & in the long term. Jackzhp (talk) 20:07, 23 March 2009 (UTC)

This edit

...

The confusion arises from the fact that "PPP" can refer to the long run theory of exchange rates or it can refer to the adjustments made to international calculations of income for the fact that the theory does not hold exactly. The terminology is confusing as well "PPP dollars" (or "International dollars" or "Geary-Khamis dollars") refers to the purchasing power of local currency in the local economy, rather then the purchasing power of the local currency in the international economy - but this is, again, an adjustment for the fact that purchasing power differs between the local country and the world as a whole. "PPP dollars" DOES NOT refer to incomes calculated under the assumption that PPP holds. Volunteer Marek  19:08, 26 January 2011 (UTC)

PPP exchange rates are the rate of exchange based on equal value of a basket of goods bought in the two different countries. The nominal exchange rate is the one I get when I wander along to the bank and ask to have some Indian Rupees in exchange for my local currency.

... Eraserhead1 <talk> 19:47, 26 January 2011 (UTC)

The article is about PPP theory. This text: "but such a calculation would only be valid under the PPP theory" is incorrect - in fact the opposite is true (nm the fact that it sounds like OR). So that is not what the sentence means. Volunteer Marek  22:02, 26 January 2011 (UTC)

...

PPP Has Serious Flaws And Is Highly Misleading

This article needs to make it clear that: "GDP (nominal) per capita" is based on one thing and one thing only: the world currency markets. The value that markets assign to various currencies is the ONLY real-world value that currencies have. Thus GDP (nominal) per capita is the ONLY definitive way to compare national economies. The PPP method, which has increasingly gained favor in recent years, is highly flawed and is based on obscure methodology that (absurdly) ranks items like McDonald's "Big Mac" hamburgers (even though the latter is far more of a "staple" of daily living in a place like the U.S., than somewhere like, say, Taiwan or Bolivia). Meanwhile, the basic staples of daily life in a place like, say, Japan, are not even factored into the PPP valuations. The U.S. media is very strongly misleading its readers when it relies solely on PPP numbers (and fails to inform its readership exactly what PPP is based on). There are some (flimsy) arguments for the use of PPP, but by and large it is a highly flawed methodology that really needs to be scrapped entirely. It's foolish to rely on anything other than the marketplace to determine the true value of a given currency. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.86.119.156 (talk) 03:49, 1 June 2006

Calling PPP an "obscure methodology" is absurd. It's actually a fairly simple method that attempts to correct for fact that goods are priced differently in different countries. You could also think of PPP as a way to correct for the fact that market value of currencies is determined only by international trade, ignoring the rest of a country's economy. Is PPP perfect? Of course not. Is it better for some purposes than using market value? Definitely. Isomorphic 03:17, 1 June 2006 (UTC)

re: "Calling PPP an "obscure methodology" is absurd." Oh really? Then, please explain the exact methodology that PPP is based on. Despite what you say, it is hardly "simple." It involves nothing less than the complex process of measuring all of the staples of day-to-day life in one nation against another nation's staples. At least, that is what it is SUPPOSED to measure. The reality is that PPP is an Anglo-American invention and it has a pro-Western bias as a result. It's interesting to note that PPP was never used in U.S. academia and media for many years, until the 1980s (when, for the first time, other nation's economies, including Germany and Japan, started surpassing the U.S. in income rates per capita for the first time). By contrast, PPP had a long history before then of being used to "prop up" the sub-par economies of places like Australia and New Zealand. In a nutshell, the U.S. has been losing ground economically to much of the rest of the First World since the 1980s, thanks to things like our titanic and out-of-control deficits, as well as our disastrous embrace of "globalization" and "free" trade policies. But instead of honestly acknowledging this crisis and working to deal with it, the U.S. media and academia is keeping the American public in the dark about the true extent of the problem by rolling out idiotic and misleading economic "yardsticks" like PPP. You might ask: why, exactly, would U.S. academia and media mislead the public in this manner? The answer is: both U.S. academia and the mainstream media are cheerleaders for free trade and globalization. As the U.S. embraces free trade and globalization, academia/media are determined to convince the public that this trend has favored the U.S. economy (even if they have to twist and distort the economic statistics to "prove" their point).

Its funny how those brains that think so much about conspiracy theories of PPP don't understand how comparison of economies of different regions make so much less sense without PPP concept. Not that PPP makes such comparisons absolutely meaningful, but it does a good job. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Chandu15 (talk • contribs) 14:09, 15 May 2009 (UTC)

Well, it does seem that our friend, who doesn't even bother to sign his bold comments, is a trifle paranoid, doesn't it? While he is of course free to express his somewhat anarchistic beliefs, he cannot expect the mainstream to take them into serious account (okay, they'd warrant a "anarchist view of PPP" section here, but it'd have to be a thousand guys saing what he's saying, not just him). We can't have every man's opinion here, there's not the space, the resources, or the rationale for it. This is an encyclopedia, not a forum. Most of the time, on value-judgment issues, the mainstream and a couple of the main opposing views will have to do in the best of articles. He'd do well to consider that.

He'd also do well to read at least an introductory seminar in economics before throwing about statements like "It's foolish to rely on anything other than the marketplace to determine the true value of a given currency.". First, PPP is not used to value a currency, that's what the normal exchange rate is for, strictly speaking. So he's basically ranting off-topic for two long paragraphs. Second, his criticism of the PPP concept is not based on constructive arguments relating to PPP, it is based on some rather imaginative allegations of the manipulation of the process, result, or its presentation. Third, his accusations of media warping public opinion by selective information are true, universally. More in some states, less in others. I live in the Czech Republic, and I can tell him that he's never seen useless, scandal-hunting, imprecise, and occasionally politician-influenced media if he's living in the US. And I know that the Czech Rep. is still vastly better off compared to many other countries in the world in this respect. However, even in the best of media an accurate portrayal of the economic situation is almost impossible. It takes an educated economist quite a lot of work to even estimate the state of the economy; most of the concepts he works with are incomprehensible to the general public, at least so without an explanation way too long to put in the news. Finally, fourth, as to data manipulation, a skilled economist can manipulate the data that goes to press well enough to convince him that his grandmother will be a millionaire in five years on state pension only, and he'll never notice. Take the recent crisis - the widespread opinion in early 2008 was that it was the height of the boom, with no end in sight, while in fact the economy was on the verge of a massive collapse. And he's concerned that PPP makes people think the US is stronger than it appears...

Actually, the only part of his comment that has some sense at all is the title - if you slashed the "serious" by flaws and the "highly" by misleading, and applied the appropriate context, it'd be perfectly true. But then again, so would almost any statement given the abovementioned treatment - not by manipulation, but simply because reality is rarely black and white.

Sorry for spamming the place.

89.102.120.154 (talk) 17:03, 6 February 2011 (UTC) (user: Misacek01 ; forgot to login)

comparing PPP

When you compare teh PPP from one year to the next in given country, is it better for the country if the PPP decreases or increases? For example, if the PPP for 1999 was $US700 and in 2003 was $US1000 is that a positive result or is it bad for PPP to increase? Thank you! 58.169.1.129 01:52, 28 April 2007 (UTC)

It's still GDP, just adjusted by the price levels in the given states. Thus, applying PPP to nominal GDP can never change its sign (either make it negative in abolute or change the sign of a change in GDP so that a lower PPP GDP would mean higher aboslute GDP or vice versa). The only thing that can change as a result of PPP application is the ordering relation between the different states' GDPs. That is, suppose state A has higher nominal GDP than state B. Then it is possible (but not necessary) that in PPP terms, state B will have higher GDP than state A.

Simply, PPP is a ratio based on price levels in the two states that you use to multiply the nominal GDP to obtain the PPP adjusted one. As a ratio of two positive numbers, it can only be positive. Therefore, it can change the relative values of the two GDPs, but not the notion of what "increase" and "decrease" in one of the states' GDPs means, and certainly cannot make the value nagative.

Hope this is understandable

Sincerely

89.102.120.154 :(talk) 17:23, 6 February 2011 (UTC) (user: Misacek01 ; forgot to login)

One more thing: the above only holds ceteris paribus (all other things held equal), which in this case means unless the purchasing power of the state you are comparing to has changed in the intervening year as well. If for example you got richer in nominal GDP and your purchasing power (how much a unit of money can buy in your country) stayed the same, then your PPP GDP will increase, unless the country you're comparing yourself to has increased its purchasing power enough to negate your getting richer when you compute it in their money (that is, e.g. you're some state other than the US and a dollar can suddenly buy much more stuff in the US, which would, had you not grown, have decreased your PPP GDP (your strength recounted to US market conditions). You have grown, but your small growth and the corresponding small increase in your PPP GDP was not enough to offset the Americans suddenly living large and you seeming poorer by comparison.

This is difficult without a formal apparatus, I hope it made some sense. It'd be better with equations and a graph, than it'd be clear to you immediately.

Try this: Take how much a dollar can buy in the US, take how much the same dollar exchanged for your local currency can buy in your own country, then divide the second by the first. You get your purchasing power parity against the US dollar. Use this number to multiply your nominal GDP. Try it on a piece of paper, change around the values - you can change the (nominal, i.e. what you get in an exchange office) exchange rate, your GDP, US GDP, how much a dollar buys in the US and in your other country, or whichever combination you like. See what happens.

In practice, the composition of the "basket" i.e. the stuff that you'll be buying with the benchmark dollar, is the hardest to determine. However, to see the effects I described that choice doesn't matter. Use "how many loaves of bread for one dollar" or whatever other simple and unrealistic thing you choose, just do it in integer numbers to make it simple. Actual real-world values would just get you stumped in calculations and decimal-point-sized changes in the result for a realistic input change.

There are a dozen possible end effects (maybe more, I'm not sure, I'm not in the mood for combinatorics :-) ). However, what I described above, the purchasing power in the benchmark state changing more than your adjusted GDP, is extremely rare. Purchasing power tends to be very stable in developed economies (usually grows, but quite slowly). If, on the other hand, you used the purchasing power of some third world state in rapid development (which is almost never done in practice), you could get very variable results.

A numerical example: your nominal GDP is 1000 dollars, America's is 5000 dollars. A dollar can buy one loaf of bread in the US. When you exchange that dollar for your local currency, the money you get can also buy one loaf of bread in your home country. Therefore (if bread is the only thing people buy both in the US and your country), your currency has a PPP of 1 against the dollar (or, to say it better, the purchasing power parity of your country against the US is 1). Therefore, your PPP-adjusted GDP is still 1000. (You don't PPP-adjust the GDP of the state you have chosen as a benchmark, so America's will in this example always be 5000. Alternatively, you could use your country as the benchmark and adjust the US GDP, but in that case don't forget to invert the PPP calculation - the US's purchasing power divided by yours.) Now, suppose in the next year your nominal GDP grows to 1500 dollars, but the price of bread in America miraculously drops to one half, while in your country it stays the same. Also the exchange rate between the dollar and your currency stays the same. Now, the Americans can buy two loaves of bread with a dollar while you can still only buy one. Thus, your PPP against the US is now 1/2. Your PPP-ajusted GDP (nomial GDP times the PPP) is now (1500*1/2) = 750, while America's stayed the same at 5000. Thus, your PPP-against-the-US-adjusted GDP fell by a quarter even though your nominal GDP increased by half.

Sincerely 89.102.120.154 (talk) 17:41, 6 February 2011 (UTC) (user: Misacek01 ; forgot to login)

Starbucks tall latte index

This section is stupid and should be deleted. ... Lycurgus (talk) 08:15, 8 June 2011 (UTC)

Deleted in 2013 as it continued to get more and more obsolete. It didn't add anything conceptually that the Big Mac Index didn't already provide.--Brian Dell (talk) 05:39, 3 February 2013 (UTC)

Nominal vs. PPP

• In terms of a country's economic size/capacity, nominal GDP is a much more accurate look at the economic power of a country. Seriously just the thought of China having a GDP 3/4 the size of the US economy in terms of PPP is just preposterous! Look at the Fortune global 2000 list of the largest most powerful companies in the world. The US has almost 700(!!!) of the Fortune's 2000 companies (which are 20 times the size of the Chinese counterparts) while China has all but 50! Please can someone just admit that nominal is much more realistic in terms of economic size/capacity. I'm gonna be fair and say that PPP is more of a standard of living indicator and mostly theoretical... Last I thought Bangladesh wasn't larger than Switzerland in economic size. Through PPP it's saying that a poor country with low enough prices equals a much larger GDP? I think in the future economists will perfect or at least come close to more accurately portraying the size of a country's economy. I remember just a few years back nominal was the default statistic and now recently PPP has come a lot more into favor. Can I please get follow up, thanks. -Nick

• Please do follow up. But I think that some of this might be best done by eliminating and consolidating some of the repetitious material that seems to go "It's important" "No it's not" "Yes it is" etc. I think what gets lost in here is that PPP is really a set of theories about how exchange rates are determined, and this GDP adjustment thingee is just a controversial and impresise side-light. Smallbones 14:38, 6 June 2006 (UTC)

• Seriously you have a point when it comes to the controversial aspects of this purchasing power parity (PPP) statistic. To me it seems that western economists came out with PPP to say, "hey wait a minute, look these 3rd world countries don't look so poor anymore afterall" and seems like a cheap irrational way of portraying more equality in the world. This is just my 7 cents. (adjusted 4 inflation) -Nick

• Will not it obstruct understanding I use an own country standard (PPP) without unity, and to do ranking without using international purchasing power standard(nominal) though I do international comparison?

The greater the wealth inequality the higher your PPP is in relation to the nominal GDP per capita. PPP is based on one income and then you assume everybody in that economy buys exactly the same things, and in the same proportion. Ridiculous! Stupid measure of wealth. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.175.6.205 (talk) 09:50, 1 December 2014 (UTC)

And yes, Purchasing Power Parity is a nonsense propaganda measure of wealth. As all it really tells you is how far away the median wealth of the nation is from the nation's mean wealth. The further you can push the median down, away further from the mean, the higher your PPP is in relation to your nominal GDP per capita. So, if the wealth of a nation's economy is being hoarded by an elite few then obviously the median wealth is going to be relatively very low and therefore those privileged few, at the mean wealth level and above, become richer, in terms of purchasing power. This is because in increasing the wealth of the elite you've impoverished, enslaved, the rest of the population by reducing their share of the wealth. So, as result of impoverishing most people, the costs of services for the wealthy reduce. But, what does that mean for the economy as a whole? ABOSULETLY NOTHING that's what! If you impoverish most people in an economy that doesn't make your economy any richer or for that matter any poorer, it actually doesn't change anything for the economy as a whole. Outside the elite, most people spend their money on goods that have very little service costs involved. They are far less likely, for example, to eat out and buy most of their food in supermarkets instead, where service costs are a much lower percentage cost of the food purchased than in restaurants. Your economy doesn't immediately becoming richer just by increasing inequality, that's just so stupid! Reducing the cost of services in your economy by impoverishing most people is completely insane! Purchasing Power Parity uses appalling sampling as it depends on the wealth of only those at the mean level, for its entire sample base. The problem is you can't ever do comprehensive enough sampling to make PPP work because the wealthy few aren't going to tell you what they spend their money exactly on, there just isn't enough of them to work that out from an average. So, the more wealth is held by the elite few, the less reliable PPP becomes, by definition. Nominal GDP per capita is a far more accurate measure of wealth as it represents the entire economy, condensed to the average wealth level figure. If you were to spend the Nominal GDP capita, to find out how much it was truly worth, you'd have to carefully slice it up into millions of little segments, according to how much wealth was held at each wealth level, then spend it that way and that is not what Purchasing Power Parity even gets close to achieving. PPP is a stupid measure of wealth as it's self-evidently just the propaganda of the greedy rich and it is bad maths too! — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.176.162.206 (talk) 04:13, 31 March 2015 (UTC)

Logical Question

Hi all, as a lay reader I cannot understand the statement purchasing power parity assume that in some circumstances (for example, as a long-run tendency) specifically the part about an assumption being true both in some circumstances and as a long-run tendency. Isn't there a contradiction in there somewhere?--Wikishagnik (talk) 09:52, 1 August 2015 (UTC)

External Link

I don't really see why the link to the new UBS report (https://www.ubs.com/microsites/prices-earnings/shared/_jcr_content/par/actionbutton.1062824217.file/bGluay9wYXRoPS9jb250ZW50L2RhbS91YnMvbWljcm9zaXRlcy9wcmljaW5nZWFybmluZ3MvdWJzLXByaWNlc2FuZGVhcm5pbmdzLTIwMTUtZW4ucGRm/ubs-pricesandearnings-2015-en.pdf) about prices and earnings got deleted when the one from 2006 is in the further reading list. It would only make sense to keep the information as updated as possible. SouthBundy (talk) 20:40, 29 December 2015 (UTC)

REORGANIZATION

Hi. I did a major reorganization of the page on 25 Aug 2019. I didn't delete any text. I just came up with some sensible headers and moved each piece of text under the header I thought it belonged to.

I think it works, but the text has a lot of repetition. If I get the chance, I'll do a little cleanup to reduce the repetition and make it flow better.

I'd like to emphasize that PPP is a spatial deflator. That is, it allows comparison of some economic numbers between different locations. It can be used inside the same country or inside the same currency region (e.g., Euro). That said, it is most commonly used between regions with different currencies. I'd like to add a comparison to CPI which is a similar temporal deflator, used to compare some economic numbers across time.

I'd also like to add something about how PPP is calculated by professionals. That is sorely missing. And it was important to me. (I have a Masters in Economics.)

Lastly, if I have the time, I'll go through this talk page and summarize the complaints/comments. My work on the Type Theory page has led me to believe that it's good to clean house here, when you reorganize the topic page.

Mike Nahas Mdnahas (talk) 06:16, 25 August 2019 (UTC)

I just cleaned up the talk page. I removed most comments about specific text that is now gone. I kept a comment (or the heart of it) if it was about the subject PPP.

Mdnahas (talk) 20:06, 7 September 2019 (UTC)

Does povert affect the PPP exchange rate?

"The PPP inflation and exchange rate may differ from the market exchange rate because of poverty, tariffs, and other transaction costs." This appears at the beginning of the article.

How does poverty affect the nominal exchange rate that is implied by the PPP?

I think this is a grossly imprecision. Perhaps the editor meant that when some goods are not traded in markets the PPP-implied nominal rate and the market nominal rate will differ. But that applies in general to non-tradable goods in international markets, not only to 'poverty'.

Don Ema Valecirro (talk) 02:12, 17 November 2020 (UTC)

@Don Ema Valecirro: What is "PPP-implied nominal rate"? --Yomal Sidoroff-Biarmskii (talk) 13:31, 13 March 2021 (UTC)

@Sidoroff-B: The nominal (market) exchange rate adjusted by PPP. In other terms, the nominal exchange rate that will make the cost of the same basket of goods and services cost the same in the USA and the country that is compared against. THe OECD computes them, https://data.oecd.org/conversion/exchange-rates.htm#indicator-chart

Don Ema Valecirro (talk) 04:30, 14 March 2021 (UTC)