期刊名称：Discussion Papers / School of Business, University of New South Wales
出版年度：2007
卷号：2007
出版社：Sydney
摘要：The construction of spatial benchmark estimates of differences in per capita income
across countries is more complicated and more important than is generally recognized
in the convergence literature. Using data from the International Comparisons Program
(ICP) for the years 1980, 1985 and 1996, and national growth rate data from the IMF
it is shown that the choice of multilateral price index method can significantly affect
the results, even to the extent of sometimes switching the outcome from convergence
to divergence or vice versa. I show how the substitution bias inherent in some methods,
such as the Geary-Khamis method that underlies the Penn World Table (PWT),
can be exploited to push the results either towards convergence or divergence. Even
methods, such as EKS, that are free of substitution bias are often undermined by the
poor quality of the underlying benchmark data. I show how the reliability of the results
can be increased by computing multiple estimates of each benchmark by extrapolating
from earlier or later benchmarks using national growth rate data and then averaging
the results. In particular, over the period 1980 to 1985, the standard EKS method
shows convergence while, after benchmark averaging, it shows divergence. Benchmark
averaging on EKS also significantly reduces the amount of divergence between 1980 and
1996 as compared with the PWT method (Geary-Khamis).
关键词：Sigma Convergence; Penn World Table; Multilateral Price Index; International
Comparisons Program; Benchmark Averaging; Substitution Bias
