The present volume provides a timely collection of material on the subject of international comparisons, contributed by leading scholars from an extensive range of relevant disciplines and geographical backgrounds. The papers in this volume have been classified into two broad groups united by overlapping themes. Part I includes essentially empirical papers intended to provide a clear picture of the different types of international comparisons that have been undertaken by various organizations and individuals. The papers relate to empirical studies of different sectoral and national income aggregates at both regional and global levels. The papers in Part II deal with methodological and analytical issues. Discussion of the appropriateness of various aggregation methods for international comparisons accounts for a major component of this section. The volume provides a set of stimulating studies on international comparisons of prices, output and productivity, and will provide a useful reference source for many interested readers around the world.

Economists wish to compare prices, real income, and output across countries and regions for many purposes. In the past, such comparisons were made in nominal terms, or by using exchange rates across countries, ignoring differences in price levels and thus distorting the results. Great progress has been made in interspatial comparisons in the past thirty years, but descriptions and discussions of the new measures have been scattered in unpublished or inaccessible papers. International and Interarea Comparisons of Income, Output, and Prices includes discussions of developments in the United Nations International Comparison Program, the largest effort in this field, and in the ICOP program on the production side, including efforts in both to extend the comparisons to the formerly planned economies. Other papers in this volume explore new programs on interspatial comparisons within the United States. There are also theoretical papers on how interspatial comparisons should be made and several examples of uses of such comparisons.

These two volumes present empirical studies that have permanently altered professional debates over investment and productivity as sources of postwar economic growth in industrialized countries. The distinctive feature of investment is that returns can be internalized by the investor. The most straightforward application of this idea is to investments that create property rights, but these volumes broaden the meaning of capital formation to include investments in education and training. International Comparisons of Economic Growth focuses on comparisons among industrialized countries. Although Germany and Japan are often portrayed as economic adversaries of the U.S., postwar experiences in all three countries support policies that give high priority to stimulating and rewarding capital formation. In the Asian model of growth exemplified by Japan investments in tangible assets and human capital are especially critical during periods of rapid growth.

Conference report on the use of national income concepts and data to appraise the input output of national economies and some related aspects of international prices and trade - discusses such topics as problems of economic growth and national income differences between developed countries and developing countries, relative prices in national planning for economic development, competition in international trade, etc., and includes a comparison of productivity levels in the USA and the USSR. Statistical tables. Conference held in toronto 1970 may.

A guide for constructing and using composite indicators for policy makers, academics, the media and other interested parties. In particular, this handbook is concerned with indicators which compare and rank country performance.