Accurate and timely measures of cross-country real incomes are still a rarity. As the share of expenditure devoted to food is readily available, we use of Engel's law in reciprocal form to measure affluence. Analysis of real income data for the OECD countries indicates that this approach is...

The present paper analyses citations in the work of a large number of PhD students. We show that the pattern of citations of journal articles, books and other reference material differs substantially across areas within economics. An investigation of reciprocal citations reveals a surprisingly...

Are food prices more or less equalised across countries? In view of obvious barriers to trade (both naturally occurring and of a man-made nature) and currency gyrations, the answer would seem to be an unambiguous “No”, but we show this question is worthy of further investigation. In order...

This paper reviews and synthetises three areas: The International Comparison Program (ICP), purchasing power parity (PPP) and patterns of household expenditure across countries. To compare countries consistently, the ICP uses relative price levels as PPPs. This approach is seemingly different to...

Australians are among the largest consumers of marijuana in the world, and estimates show that their expenditure on marijuana is approximately twice that on wine. In the present paper, the evolution of Australian marijuana prices over the last decade is analysed, and a decline in real terms by...