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...

This paper analyses import penetration with a consumer demand approach that distinguishes domestically and foreign-produced varieties. Consistent aggregation leads to a macro-level import demand equation that faithfully reflects the underlying micro demands for foreign varieties. The approach...

There are significant disparities in the wealth of nations and how incomes are spent. For example, consumers in the poorest countries spend more than half of income on food, whilein the richest countries, this is one-tenth or less. We use the recently published data from theInternational...