DEFINING AND MEASURING THE PUBLIC SECTOR: SOME INTERNATIONAL COMPARISONS

The public sector is defined here to include government plus public enterprises. Historically, economists and statisticians have been more concerned with its separate components than with the public sector as a whole, but it is suggested that the public sector may be an appropriate concept for studying several current problems of economic policy. While there is general agreement as to what constitutes government, countries have differing views about what makes an enterprise public. Differences in country definitions of public enterprises are identified as one of the main problems in making international comparisons for the public sector. Statistics are presented for up to 16 OECD countries on the share of the public sector in total final demand, value added, employment, and net lending. It is argued that there is rarely a unique answer to the question “How big is the public sector?” For most countries judicious selection of data and careful definition will lead to different conclusions about the size and growth of the public sector. Because of the lack of data, it is not possible to analyse public sectors in developing countries in the same detail as OECD countries. The evidence available suggests that while public sectors are about the same size in both OECD and developing countries, public enterprises play a more important role in the latter.     

MEASURING INTERNATIONAL AND INTER-SECTORAL TERMS OF TRADE: SOME METHODOLOGICAL ISSUES

The view is expressed that the well-known formulae for measuring changes in terms of trade cannot be used to conclude whether a country is better off or not. Other variables which reflect the impact upon production, employment, and the competitive position should also be taken into account.
Similarly, changes in terms of trade between the industrial sectors of an economy cannot be used to conclude whether one sector is better off than others. Other factors which play a role include increases in productivity per man-hour. These may help to explain why in some sectors prices increase less than in others. An attempt is made to illustrate this point using some statistics for the Netherlands.     

MEASURING INEQUALITY WITHIN THE HOUSEHOLD

The purpose of this paper is to explore a number of measures of inequality within households. We focus primarily on two types of inequality, first, inequality in money incomes, second, inequality in control over household resources. Control is measured in two ways: first, as control over the management of household finances and, second, as influence over household decision-making. We discuss arguments for and against each of the measures of inequality, and compare the measures against one another in terms of the level of inequality each measure finds. The paper does not attempt to explain inequality; instead, its aim is to discuss the question “What is it that we wish to explain?”

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PURCHASING POWER PARITIES IN INTERNATIONAL COMPARISONS: QUANTITY vs. PRICE COMPARISONS

Just as intertemporal price indices have two functions, to measure price changes and to deflate current values to constant values, this is true also for interspatial price indices, purchasing power parities (PPPs). In practice these two functions of PPPs, for conversion and for comparing price levels, are not always distinguished, and this may have some disadvantages since in a number of cases the differences between the two PPPs might be considerable. The authors review the differences in content of the two types of PPPs, and make some suggestions for making the distinction more explicitly.     

INTERNATIONAL COMPARISONS OF WEALTH INEQUALITY

This study presents reasonably comparable estimates of the size distribution of household or personal wealth for eight OECD countries—Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. In the mid-1980s, the U.S. ranked as the most unequal and Japan the least, while the other six countries had roughly comparable levels of wealth inequality. Moreover, while wealth inequality rose sharply in the U.S. during the 1980s, it increased modestly in Sweden and showed little change or a slight decline in Canada, France, and the U.K. A comparison of time trends for the U.K. and the U.S. suggests that the relatively high wealth inequality in the U.S. in the 1980s represents a marked turnaround from the 1950s, when the U.S. was considerably more equal in terms of wealth ownership than the U.K. Comparative results for the two countries hold for both conventional (marketable) wealth and for augmented wealth, which includes a valuation of public and private pension wealth.     

THE SENSITIVITY OF INTERNATIONAL POVERTY COMPARISONS

Using data from the Luxembourg Income Study, I study the sensitivity of cross-national income poverty comparisons to the method in which poverty is measured. Absolute poverty comparisons that keep the purchasing power at the poverty line constant across countries lead to conclusions that differ from relative poverty comparisons in which the real value of the poverty line varies with average income. The absolute poverty ranking of countries also varies as the real value of the poverty line is lowered. Cross-national differences in household characteristics are largely irrelevant in explaining poverty differences.     

ON AGGREGATION METHODS FOR INTERNATIONAL COMPARISONS

This paper brings together discussions of Geary–Khamis indexes now available only in scattered sources, and considers their application to a range of uses. The first section traces the development of the method from its initial proposal by Geary in 1953, with the aid of a numerical example illustrating differences among various formulations. The second section considers the least squares properties of Geary-Khamis indexes and some related variants. The final section considers adjustments to the method required for regionalization and spatio-temporal bilateral and multilateral comparisons, as well as to take account of the nature of available data.     

INTERNATIONAL COMPARISONS OF INTER-INDUSTRY WAGE DIFFERENTIALS

We use OECD data to examine inter-industry wage differentials (relative wages among industries) for 14 OECD countries over the period 1970–85. We find, first, that the industrial wage structures have shown remarkable stability over time in terms of rank order for all the countries in the sample. Second, despite their rank order stability, wage structures show a tendency to expand or contract. While the U.S. has shown increasing industry wage dispersion between 1970 and 1985, the pattern is very mixed for other countries. Unionization is a significant factor in explaining cross-country differences. Third, industry wage rankings show some evidence of becoming increasingly similar across nations over time, and this movement is associated with a convergence of per capita incomes. Fourth, industry wage differentials are positively related to an industry's productivity growth, output growth, capital intensity, and export orientation.     

INTERNATIONAL COMPARISONS OF LABOR COSTS IN MANUFACTURING

This paper presents a comparative study of the levels of unit labor costs in the manufacturing sectors of several countries. We begin by surveying earlier estimates of relative productivity and unit labor cost levels and evaluating the various methodologies that have been used in previous studies. Empirical estimates of relative unit labor costs, based on output levels that are translated at purchasing power parity exchange rates, are then presented and compared to earlier estimates. The results show that the relative levels of unit labor costs in the United States and abroad have fluctuated significantly in recent years, due largely to movements in nominal exchange rates. In 1988, unit labor costs in the United States were below the average level of other industrialized countries, but were significantly above the level in a representative newly industrialized country, Korea. Insofar as unit labor costs serve as an indicator of international competitiveness, these results imply that the competitiveness of the U.S. manufacturing sector had improved significantly since 1985, at least with respect to other major industrialized countries.     

证券信用交易的国际比较及其在中国的发展

从国际比较和国内证券市场发展的实践看,发展证券信用交易存在一定的经济内在要求,法律应该反映这一要求,《证券法》在进一步修改完善时应考虑到这一点。一味地堵,不允许证券信用交易的存在不符合中国证券市场发展的客观实际。     

PROCEDURES FOR UPDATING THE RESULTS OF INTERNATIONAL COMPARISONS

This article reviews the problems involved in updating the results of international comparisons, in terms of an analytic framework focusing upon the sources of differences between various forms of extrapolation and direct comparisons. The factors identified as important are conservation of prices of the base period and weight inconsistency. The reliability of updating is undoubtedly affected by the length of the period over which the data are extrapolated. A program of regular benchmark comparisons at approximately five-year intervals with updating for the intervening years is attractive, since it permits checking by forward and backward interpolation. Where there are large deviations, however, averaging is not an acceptable solution.     

INTERNATIONAL PRICE COMPARISONS BASED UPON INCOMPLETE DATA*

This paper is directed at the following question: given an incomplete set of price data relating to goods or services in some category of output for each of a number of different countries, what arithmetic should be performed on the prices to get a meaningful representation of the relative category price-levels of the countries? In the course of developing an answer to the question, some broader matters are considered and illuminated. A comparison of category price-levels for different countries is analogous to a commonly-encountered problem in many areas, that of ranking ordinally or cardinally in one dimension a group of “entities”—persons, households, firms, industries, etc.—on the basis of sets of measurements associated with the individual entities. It is this point of view which dominates the following presentation.