THE INTERNATIONAL COMPARISONS OF CONSUMPTION LEVEL CARRIED OUT BY THE POLISH CENTRAL STATISTICAL OFFICE

Eugenia Krzeczkowska

Review of Income and Wealth, 1967, vol. 13, issue 4, 353-365

Abstract: 1. The problems presented have arisen in practice when carrying out international comparisons of national income and its elements between the CMEA countries. Some rough conclusions are drawn from the nearly completed comparison of consumption level between Poland and Austria. 2. The basic methodological principles of the comparison were similar to the methods used by the group of economists directed by Milton Gilbert and Irving Kravis in their comparison relating to Western European countries. However, a number of new problems have emerged in the course of our work which required practical and theoretical solutions. Some differences in theoretical approach between the Gilbert‐Kravis study and ours are discussed. Gilbert and Kravis based their comparison as far as possible on average prices of commodity groups or quantity data, and price indexes for representative goods were applied only as a practical necessity. On the contrary in our study we based our calculation mainly on representative goods and their price relation as this method, in our opinion, takes into account quality differences, which escape from the picture in the Gilbert‐Kravis method. 3. Some special theoretical and practical problems of comparisons between countries having market economies and those with planned economies are presented in terms of the example of the comparison of consumption levels between Austria and Poland. Three groups of questions are pointed out: (1) the problem of the definition and boundaries of the aggregates compared; (2) the problem of differences in pricing in the groups of products and services compared, resulting from the social policy of the government concerned; and (3) the problem of differences arising from general price policies in the countries compared. 4. At the end of the paper it is suggested that it would be useful to work out a “statistical information system”, which would make possible detailed comparisons of the volume of consumption among several countries and groups of countries without the need of conducting direct comparisons between each pair of countries.

Date: 1967
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4991.1967.tb00750.x

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:bla:revinw:v:13:y:1967:i:4:p:353-365

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=0034-6586

Access Statistics for this article

Review of Income and Wealth is currently edited by Conchita D'Ambrosio and Robert J. Hill

More articles in Review of Income and Wealth from International Association for Research in Income and Wealth Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().