Purchasing Power Parities (PPPs) for COMECON countries: An unknown international comparison project

Abstract

Today, it is difficult to imagine modern statistics without the UN international comparison program (UN ICP), based on the use of purchasing power parities (PPP) of national currencies. But it was not the only international comparison project based on the PPP methodology. Before the collapse of the planned economy in the early 1990s, the Soviet Union and most of the Eastern bloc countries did not join the UN ICP due to political reasons. These countries established their own project within the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA, or, in other terms, COMECON) for international comparisons of national income and a number of other macroeconomic indicators and conducted several rounds of comparisons between 1959 and 1988 (1959, 1966, 1973, 1978, 1983, 1988). COMECON authorities never published the comparison results in the public domain but distributed them as documents “for official use” or even as “secret” ones to limited government bodies. However, the project results were kept in the statistical archives and are currently available.

The article discusses the details of the COMECON comparison project, its methodology, initial data, reliability, and the main results of the comparisons.