The Poverty of Statistics
Alan Freeman
MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany
Abstract:
This paper is a prepublication version of a paper accepted for publication by Third World Quarterly. It offers a critique of the picture of world growth and world inequality generally disseminated by international agencies. The positive view commonly presented depends, it shows, on the widespread consensus that economic performance should be measured using ‘Purchasing Power Parity’ (PPP) statistics, instead of market exchange rates. Although originally conceived narrowly as a basis for comparing living standards, PPP indicators are now promoted, with scant pause for critical thought, as a unique and unexceptionable standard for comparing and aggregating national income statistics. To get to the heart of the flaws in the PPP concept, this article adopts a unique approach: it accepts the claims made on their behalf at face value. It shows that, even on the basis of these claims, the wrong conclusions have been drawn, which in turn shows that they are not fit for purpose. By comparing PPP and Market Exchange Rate measures of inequality it shows that what really took place, in the closing decades of the last century, was a systematic reduction in the prices of consumption goods in the third world. PPP statistics have concealed this underlying and unsustainable trend, allowing it to be packaged as a stable reduction in poverty. Neither genuine growth, nor lasting and sustainable poverty reduction, were achieved over this period. The fall in the price of consumer goods masked a systematic failure, for much of the third world, to overcome the central problem of development – the high price of capital goods, which PPP statistics understate and, intermediate goods, which PPP statistics completely omit.
Keywords: Inequality; Development; Value Theory; Temporalism, World Systems Theory, Dependency Theory, Globalization, TSSI, General Equilibrium (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: B4 C0 O10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008-12-01, Revised 2009-08-15
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hpe and nep-pke
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)
Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/16827/1/MPRA_paper_16827.pdf original version (application/pdf)
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:16827
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter (winter@lmu.de).