A System of International Comparisons of Gross Product and Purchasing Power

International comparisons of production, consumption, and investment are indispensable for the analysis of economic and social development. As a result of work over the past two decades by national statistical offices, the United Nations and other international organizations, data on national income and expenditure are becoming more and more comparable from the standpoint of statistical methodology. However, even where standard methodology has been adopted to produce national estimates of these aggregates, a major limitation to comparability has been the inadequacy of official exchange rates for purposes of converting estimates in national currencies to a common basis of valuation. Thus, at the end of the 1960's no adequate basis existed for comparisons on a world-wide scale. The long-term aim of the work begun by the United Nations International Comparison Project in 1968 was to fill this important gap in international statistics by developing detailed intercountry comparisons for gross domestic product and the purchasing power of currencies. The results of the first stage of this effort are presented in this report. An extension of the project to cover additional countries is under way.