Estimating Cross Province and Municipal City Price Level Differences in China: Some Experiments and Results

Luigi Biggeri, Guido Ferrari () and Yanyun Zhao
Additional contact information
Luigi Biggeri: University of Florence
Guido Ferrari: University of Florence
Yanyun Zhao: Renmin University of China

Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, 2017, vol. 131, issue 1, No 9, 169-187

Abstract: Abstract The estimation of Sub-national purchasing power parities (PPPs) for countries where the regions and provinces have different level of development is fundamental for income, consumption, standard of living real term comparisons, as well as for measuring cross-region welfare inequality. This is even truer for large countries like China, where the above aggregates exhibit great variability among provinces. The aim of this paper is to compute the price level differences, measured by the PPPs, for 31 Chinese Provinces and Municipal Cities, based on a sample of 62 goods and services for the year 2014. To our knowledge, this is the first attempt to do it since many years. After a short review of previous studies on China cross-province and municipal cities price level differences measurement and the illustration of methodology and data used, the results of our elaborations are presented and discussed. Taking Beijing as the base area, there is evidence that the PPP max/min ratio is 1.74, confirming the common belief that China cross-province and municipal cities price levels are significantly different.

Keywords: Purchasing power parities; Price levels; Provinces and municipal city (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11205-016-1238-0 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:spr:soinre:v:131:y:2017:i:1:d:10.1007_s11205-016-1238-0

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11135

DOI: 10.1007/s11205-016-1238-0

Access Statistics for this article

Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement is currently edited by Filomena Maggino

More articles in Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().