A new interest in the role of services in world transactions has been generated by the current efforts of the U. S. Government to reduce barriers to international trade in services.The paper distinguishes four different classifications of economic activities between services and corrmodities....

Given the level of its production in the U.S., a firm that produces more abroad tends to have fewer employees in the U.S. and to pay slightly higher salaries and wages to them. The most likely explanation seems to be that the larger a firm's foreign production, the greater its ability to...

This paper reviews the International Comparison Program (ICP), a worldwide effort to produce international comparisons of real GDP and its components and purchasing power parities of currencies (PPPs). The robustness of results and future work are considered.A generous estimate of margins of...

The purpose of this paper is to describe the behavior of that subset of prices and price indexes that is relevant to the theory of balance of payments adjustment. The theoretical writings on the balance of payments may be viewed at this juncture as falling into two main groups -- the "standard"...

It is almost invariably taken for granted in theoretical descriptions of the international price mechanism and in the construction of trade models that a country's export price for a particular product is identical to its domestic price. Any impact of foreign or domestic events on prices is...

This paper examines changes in national price levels and prices of tradables and nontradables and relates them to changes in variables found earlier to be associated with price level differences among countries. Across countries, national price levels increase systematically with the level of a...

We use new international price measures we have developed for machinery and transport equipment to explain changes in exports and export shares of the United States, Germany, and Japan. The effects of relative price changes on export shares are fairly large, producing relative quantity changes...

The purpose of this paper is to present, and to explain the construction of, a set of price indexes relating to international trade in manufactured goods. These include: 1. Indexes of export prices for the U.S., Germany, and Japan, based on their weights, and indexes of competitors' prices for...

This paper attempts to find norms for long-run national price levels,and therefore, by implication, for exchange rates, that are superior to those implied by the absolute or relative versions of purchasing power parity theory. The structural variables we have found to determine these price...

The belief that the U.S. is a nation of spendthrifts, unwilling to pro- vide for the future, rests on observations of particular narrow definitions of capital formation, on the use of nominal values that ignore inter- national differences in the relative prices of capital goods, and on...