(Ted-style talk) From local prices to the global economy: how the latest data from the International Comparison Program help us understand our world today

Organiser(s): World Bank (WB)

The International Comparison Program (ICP) released its latest results for the reference year 2017 in May 2020, covering 176 economies. These results, the first for six years, provide a fresh look at the global economy prior to the emergence of COVID-19 pandemic. This session will take a visual deep dive into these new results and explore, through dynamic visualizations, how the world’s economic powerhouses have accelerated or stalled over the last few years, how the material well-being of citizens of different nations have changed, and how the ICP’s purchasing power parities (PPPs) enable cross-country comparisons and the monitoring of countries’ progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The ICP has launched its next comparison cycle for the reference year 2021. The results are expected to be released by end-2023. Due to the persistence of the COVID-19 pandemic, all ICP participating countries are facing the need to adjust their statistical practices and data collection processes. The forum will provide an opportunity to discuss the use of innovative methods and new data sources such as web scraping and scanner data to complement traditional price survey methods. Furthermore, a visual guide showcasing the use national policy makers and other users can make of the ICP data and PPPs is being released in 2021. The visual guide will feature applications across the socioeconomic spectrum, such as poverty and inequality, subnational price level differences, cost of nutritious diets, health, education, productivity, wages, and human development among others. As background, the ICP is a global initiative to collect comparative price and expenditure data in participating economies and to subsequently produce PPPs and price level indexes (PLIs) for each economy. Unlike market exchange rate-based comparisons, PPP-based cross-country comparisons of gross domestic product (GDP) and its expenditure components reflect only differences in economic outputs or volume, as PPPs control for price level differences between economies and account for the relative purchasing power of currencies in their national markets. The ICP is the largest statistical exercise in the world and relies on a wide partnership of national statistical offices, regional agencies and development banks, and international organizations. The United Nations Statistical Commission oversees this process and the ICP Global Office at the World Bank manages the program.