000			01818pab a2200157 454500
008			180718b2009 xxu||||| |||| 00| 0 eng d
100			_aFreeman, Alan
245			_aThe poverty of statistics and the statistics of poverty
260			_c2009
300			_ap.1427-448.
520			_aThis paper offers a critique of the picture of world growth and world inequality generally disseminated by international agencies. The positive view commonly presented depends on the widespread consensus that economic performance should be measured using `Purchasing Power Parity' (PPP) statistics, instead of market exchange rates. Although originally conceived narrowly as a basis for comparing living standards, PPP indicators are now indiscriminately promoted as an unexceptionable standard for comparing and aggregating national income statistics. This article highlights the flaws in the PPP approach by accepting the claims made on their behalf at face value. It shows that, even on the basis of these claims, the wrong conclusions have been drawn. By comparing PPP and market exchange rate measures of inequality it shows that what really took place, at the end of the last century, was a systematic reduction in the prices of consumption goods in the third World. PPP statistics have concealed this underlying and unsustainable trend, allowing it to be packaged as a stable reduction in poverty. Neither genuine growth, nor lasting poverty reduction was achieved over this period. The fall in the price of consumer goods masked a systematic failure to overcome the central problem of development - the high price of capital goods, which PPP statistics understate, and of intermediate goods, which they completely omit. - Reproduced.
650			_aPoverty
773			_aThird World Quarterly
908			_aN
909			_a85274
999			_c85274 _d85274