Using Online Prices for Measuring Real Consumption across Countries

摘要

International income comparisons such as the Penn World Table (PWT) rely on data provided by the International Comparisons Program (ICP) at the World Bank, which collects prices from thousands of comparable goods and services all over the world to calculate purchasing power parities (PPPs). While ICP continually improves its methods, its reliance on traditional data collection through National Statistical Offices (NSOs) causes many problems, including the low frequency of data collection (every six years), long delays in publication (results for the 2011 round were published in 2014), issues affecting the comparability of products and methods across countries and time (see e.g., Deaton and Heston 2010, Inklaar and Rao 2017), as well as the need to rely on the efforts of individual countries that can refuse to participate (e.g., Argentina for ICP 2011) or lack transparency regarding their data and methods (see Feenstra et al. 2013).The availability of new (big) data sources provides hope for improvements along several of these dimensions. In particular, we show that online prices can be used to construct quarterly PPPs published in real-time, with a closely-matched basket of goods and identical methodologies in a variety of developed and developing economies. At a more fundamental level, the ability to remotely collect online prices provides more control and transparency to the data and methodologies used to compute PPPs across countries.