Structural Determinants of Real Exchange Rates and National Price Levels: Some Empirical Evidence
发现各国价格水平差异巨大且长期存在，并证实人均GDP与价格水平正相关，例如1975年21国数据中人均GDP解释了87%的价格水平变异。
Contrary to the long-held notion of purchasing power parity (PPP), economists have found systematic evidence that the general level of prices across countries at a point in time varies dramatically. Irving B. Kravis, Alan W. Heston, and Robert Summers (1982), for example, report that some countries' national price levels are no more than one-third the U.S. price level. Extensions of this work show that such departures from PPP have persisted for decades. Recently, efforts have been made to explain systematically these persistent, or structural, departures from PPP. Pioneering work by Kravis and Robert E. Lipsey (1983, 1987, 1988) has demonstrated that a positive correlation between the price level and (real) per capita gross domestic product is robust across numerous cross-sectional specifications. For instance, using data from Kravis et al. (1982 table 6-12), 87 percent of the variation in national price levels (PL) of 21 countries' in 1975 is explained by per capita GDP (y) and a constant: