International comparisons of productivity have used exchange rates or purchasing power parity (PPP) to make output comparable across countries. While aggregate PPP holds well in the long run, sectoral deviations are very persistent. It raises the need for a currency conversion factor at the same level of aggregation as the output that is compared. Mapping prices from household expenditure surveys into the industrial classification of sectors and adjusting for taxes and international trade, I obtain an expenditure-based sector-specific PPP. Using detailed price data for 1985, 1990, 1993, and 1996, I test whether the sectoral PPPs adequately capture differential changes in relative prices between countries. For agriculture and the majority of industrial sectors, but not for most service sectors, sectoral PPP is preferred over aggregate PPP. Using the most appropriate conversion factor for each industry, productivity convergence is found to be taking place in all but a few industries for a group of 14 OECD countries. The results are robust to the base year used for the currency conversion.
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Paper provided by University of Toronto, Department of Economics in its series Working Papers with number
tecipa-290.
Find related papers by JEL classification: D24 - Microeconomics - - Production and Organizations - - - Production; Capital and Total Factor Productivity; Capacity F14 - International Economics - - Trade - - - Country and Industry Studies of Trade F31 - International Economics - - International Finance - - - Foreign Exchange O47 - Economic Development, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Growth and Aggregate Productivity - - - Measurement of Economic Growth; Aggregate Productivity; Cross-Country Output Convergence
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Durlauf, Steven N. & Quah, Danny T., 1999.
"The new empirics of economic growth,"
Handbook of Macroeconomics,
in: J. B. Taylor & M. Woodford (ed.), Handbook of Macroeconomics, edition 1, volume 1, chapter 4, pages 235-308
Elsevier.
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