The ‘Welfare Standard’ and Soviet Consumers

Irwin Collier

Comparative Economic Studies, 2005, vol. 47, issue 2, 333-345

Abstract: Quantity constraints faced by consumers in centrally planned economies prevented official relative prices in those economies from reflecting the subjective trade-offs of consumers. This has important consequences for the methodology of intersystem comparisons of consumption levels as well as the meaning of relative purchasing power. When households are subject to significant quantity constraints, traditional measures of real consumption and purchasing power parity for cross-national comparisons are afflicted with quite a different index number problem than occurs for standard comparisons between typical market economies. Data from the Soviet Union in 1976 are used to illustrate the method. Comparative Economic Studies (2005) 47, 333–345. doi:10.1057/palgrave.ces.8100115

Date: 2005
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