Оценка догоняющего развития на уровне стран и регионов: методический комментарий

The author shows that different approaches to income comparisons both on country and regional levels may lead to conflicting conclusions concerning the catching-up. It is argued that current PPPs (Instead of constant PPPs) give more reliable picture of per capita GDP convergence process on country level. Based on the case of Russian regions it is showed that different ways of converting incomes into spatially consistent prices also lead to significantly different results. The need of computing (current) regional PPPs is emphasized.