IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/mse/cesdoc/14001.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Measuring inflation under rationing: A virtual price approach

Author

Abstract

The presence of rationing or more generally of the situations of constrained demand can make the traditional methods of measuring inflation questionable and give an erroneous image of the reality. In this paper, we use the virtual price approach (Neary, Roberts, 1980) to estimate the real inflation level in a centrally planned economy (CPE) with administrated prices. In the first part of the paper, we discuss various methods used in CPE's to evaluate the real level of inflation by the market disequilibrium indicators or proxies which take into account rationing and incomplete information. In the second part of the paper, we apply the virtual price approach to compute the real inflationist gap between demand and supply under rationing in Poland's centrally planned economy with administrated prices in 1965-1980 period. We estimate for this period the model of consumer behaviour under rationing and recover the virtual prices reflecting the real cost of purchasing rationed goods following Neary, Roberts' (1980) and Barten's (1994) methodology. The results show a very large difference between official and virtual price of food considered as the most rationed good (up to 500%). The natural experiment of shift from the centrally planned economy to the market economy (or from rationing to market equilibrium) observed in Poland during the “shock therapy” (1990) confirms the scale of estimated by the model gap between the official (administrated) and market prices

Suggested Citation

  • Christophe Starzec & François Gardes, 2014. "Measuring inflation under rationing: A virtual price approach," Documents de travail du Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne 14001, Université Panthéon-Sorbonne (Paris 1), Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne.
    • Handle: RePEc:mse:cesdoc:14001
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: ftp://mse.univ-paris1.fr/pub/mse/CES2014/14001.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. E. Rothbarth, 1941. "The Measurement of Changes in Real Income under Conditions of Rationing," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 8(2), pages 100-107.
    2. Neary, J. P. & Roberts, K. W. S., 1980. "The theory of household behaviour under rationing," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 13(1), pages 25-42, January.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Blow, Laura & Crawford, Ian, 2002. "A nonparametric method for valuing new goods," Working Paper Series 143, European Central Bank.
    2. Lee, Lung-Fei & Pitt, Mark M., 1984. "Microeconometric Models of Consumer and Producer Demand with Limited Dependent Variables," Bulletins 7495, University of Minnesota, Economic Development Center.
    3. Abuelhaj, Tareq & Gassmann, Franziska & O'Donoghue, Cathal, 2018. "Price opinion data in subsidized economies: Empirical evidence from Iraq," MERIT Working Papers 2018-033, United Nations University - Maastricht Economic and Social Research Institute on Innovation and Technology (MERIT).
    4. Beblo, Miriam & Collier, Irwin L. & Knaus, Thomas, 2001. "The unification bonus (malus) in postwall Eastern Germany," ZEW Discussion Papers 01-29, ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research.
    5. Xavier Delache & Catherine Goudounèche & Hervé Guyomard & Xavier Irz & Louis-Pascal Mahé, 1995. "Analyse micro-économique d'un marché des droits à produire en agriculture : application aux quotas laitiers en France," Économie et Prévision, Programme National Persée, vol. 117(1), pages 61-75.
    6. Laura Blow & Richard Blundell, 2018. "A Nonparametric Revealed Preference Approach to Measuring the Value of Environmental Quality," Environmental & Resource Economics, Springer;European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, vol. 69(3), pages 503-527, March.
    7. Ian Crawford, 2005. "A nonparametric test of stochastic dominance in multivariate distributions," School of Economics Discussion Papers 1205, School of Economics, University of Surrey.
    8. Barbara Hutniczak & Niels Vestergaard & Dale Squires, 2019. "Policy Change Anticipation in the Buyback Context," Environmental & Resource Economics, Springer;European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, vol. 73(1), pages 111-132, May.
    9. John Creedy, 2022. "Measuring the Welfare Gain from a New Good: An Introduction," Australian Economic Review, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research, vol. 55(3), pages 417-425, September.
    10. Jerry A. Hausman, 1996. "Valuation of New Goods under Perfect and Imperfect Competition," NBER Chapters, in: The Economics of New Goods, pages 207-248, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    11. Ian Crawford, 1999. "Nonparametric tests of stochastic dominance in bivariate distributions, with an application to UK data," IFS Working Papers W99/28, Institute for Fiscal Studies.
    12. Fleissig, Adrian R. & Whitney, Gerald, 2011. "A revealed preference test of rationing," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 113(3), pages 234-236.
    13. Lein-Lein Chen & John Devereux, 2017. "The Iron Rice Bowl: Chinese Living Standards 1952–1978," Comparative Economic Studies, Palgrave Macmillan;Association for Comparative Economic Studies, vol. 59(3), pages 261-310, September.
    14. Fleissig, Adrian R. & Whitney, Gerald A., 2015. "A revealed preference test of rationing a Monte Carlo analysis," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 45(C), pages 207-211.
    15. Fleissig, Adrian R. & Whitney, Gerald, 2013. "Virtual prices and the impact of house rationing in Belgium on consumer choices," Explorations in Economic History, Elsevier, vol. 50(2), pages 308-315.
    16. Robin Winkler, 2015. "Feast or Famine: The Welfare Impact of Food Price Controls in Nazi Germany," Oxford Economic and Social History Working Papers _136, University of Oxford, Department of Economics.
    17. Christophe Starzec & François Gardes, 2014. "Measuring inflation under rationing: A virtual price approach," Post-Print halshs-00941780, HAL.
    18. Ben White, 2000. "A Review of the Economics of Biological Natural Resources," Journal of Agricultural Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 51(3), pages 419-462, September.
    19. Squires, Dale, 2016. "Firm behavior under quantity controls: The theory of virtual quantities," Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Elsevier, vol. 79(C), pages 70-86.
    20. Ian Crawford & Matthew Polisson, 2015. "Demand analysis with partially observed prices," IFS Working Papers W15/16, Institute for Fiscal Studies.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Consumer demand; rationing; inflation; virtual prices;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D12 - Microeconomics - - Household Behavior - - - Consumer Economics: Empirical Analysis
    • D45 - Microeconomics - - Market Structure, Pricing, and Design - - - Rationing; Licensing
    • E31 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles - - - Price Level; Inflation; Deflation
    • P36 - Political Economy and Comparative Economic Systems - - Socialist Institutions and Their Transitions - - - Consumer Economics; Health; Education and Training; Welfare, Income, Wealth, and Poverty

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:mse:cesdoc:14001. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Lucie Label (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/cenp1fr.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.