Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística

About - 2005

In 2003, the World Bank began the International Comparison Program willing to measure the parities of purchasing power and the levels corresponding of price and volume of the Gross National Product - GDP in a comparable base for more than 110 countries, grouped in five regions: South America, Africa, Middle East, Asia and Commonwealth of Independent States -CIS (former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics). This initiative has the objective of providing quantitative and objective answers to fundamental questions for the international comparisons of economic indicators and the counseling of national policies, such as: "how much is country A more expensive than country B", "in what sense and how much is the currency A valued in relation to currency B" or, still, "how much is the consumption per capita of goods and services of country A greater than in country B".

The comparisons which consider the adjusted GDPs regarding purchasing parities are not concluded, however there already exist preliminary regional statistics for the major component of the GDP - the household consumption - whose results are released, in this publication, for the ten South American countries in which the consumer prices were collected in 2005 with the objective of calculating those parities and apply them to household consumption for the same year. These first results are under the form of indexes, having as base the South American regional average.

Methodological information about the 2005 version of the International Comparison Program in South America, are also presented with a brief description of the methods used for the calculation of the parity rates of the purchasing power and of the expenses valued at those rates, comments about the main results of household consumption estimated in these countries, including comparisons with the previous version of the Program, besides an interview with Eduardo Pereira Nunes, President of the IBGE, who points out the importance of turning possible and significant the comparisons of economic variables of different countries and the positive influences of this experience in the institutes of statistics of the region.

In South America, the development of the project is under the combined coordination of Statistics Canada and the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean - CEPAL.