Comparing the wealth of nations : reference prices and multilateral real income indexes

This paper considers the problem of comparing real incomes across countries. The available methods are reviewed and their performance is compared using the raw data underlying the Penn World Table. The results throw light on the relative merits of different indexes and on the empirical importance of the "Gerschenkron effect": the downward bias in a country's measured real income when its own prices are used as weights. They also demonstrate the feasibility of using empirical demand parameters to estimate the GAIA ("Geary-Allen International Accounts") System.