International comparisons of economic performance are used across the social sciences, both as a phenomenon to be explained and as a control variable used to explain behavior. This award funds research that will integrate the results of the 2005 International Comparison Program (ICP) conducted by the World Bank into the Penn World Tables (PWT), a leading source for data used to compare economic performance across nations. Integrating the ICP into the PWT includes adjusting for the urban character of Chinese prices in the ICP data; aggregating by countries rather than regions without the fixity constraints of the ICP; and allowing for the fact that the ICP 2005 made productivity adjustments for non-priced services for only 3 of the 6 regions.
The new version of the PWT will include 180 countries over nearly 60 years.
Project Outcomes The focus of the research was to produce version 7.0 of the Penn World Table (PWT), a widely used freely available data set (pwt.econ.upenn.edu). PWT provides data on the major components of Gross Domestic Product from the expenditure side converted at purchasing power parties to make the quantities comparable across countries. It covers over 180 countries for some or all the years 1950 to 2009. PWT derives the purchasing power parities based upon the periodic benchmark studies of the UN International Comparison Program (ICP), now administered by the World Bank. The ICP results are in turn based upon detailed price comparisons of comparable items across countries, a very large statistical exercise that faces some organizational constraints that do not extend to PWT. The major focus of the research was to integrate the results of the 2005 ICP for 146 countries into the PWT framework that involved many adjustments and updating of PWT 6.3. The outcome is PWT 7.0 made available in June, 2011 and currently being fine tuned and updated to 2010 as PWT 7.1. PWT has steadily grown in use since its inception in the 1980s. There are over 150,000 unique visitors to PWT downloading over a million pages each year, with sites in other countries offering alternative access. PWT use depends on its perceived value that in turn depends on its methodology and periodic updates. Users include students in courses in economic and political development, international trade and econometrics. Researchers using PWT come from colleges and universities, research institutes, economic consulting firms, US government agencies, and international organizations.
