ARTÍCULOS EN REVISTAS INDEXADAS

Estimació de les Paritats de Poder Adquisitiu (PPA) per a les Comunitats autònomes espanyoles (2021)

Title of the magazine or publication: 
Monografies

Issue number: 
30

Authors:

• Alex Costa (Ajuntament de Barcelona. Oficina Municipal de Dades)
• Vittorio Galletto (Institut Metròpoli)
• Jaume Garcia (Universitat Pompeu Fabra)
• Josep Lluís Raymond (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona)
• Daniel Sánchez-Serra (OCDE)

[*] Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.

Publication date:
2024

Abstract:

Prices vary between countries, but also between territories within the same country, something that any observer can notice when traveling between countries and within a single country or state. This fact is relevant due to the changes it implies in the cost of living for the population and, consequently, in the level of well-being of individuals across different territories. There is no need to emphasize the relevance of this information for the implementation and evaluation of public policies.

Despite this relevance, there are no official statistics on purchasing power parities (PPP) at the regional level in Europe. The preamble of the 2007 Regulation of the European Parliament and the Council states that “Member States should be encouraged to develop data for regional PPPs.” However, to this day, such data still does not exist.

The objective of this study is to estimate the PPPs for the Spanish autonomous communities (ACs) using indirect methods, relying on the most complete and up-to-date information available at this time.

The methodology used has followed a dual perspective, both macro and microeconometric, as was done in the previous study that obtained PPP data for the autonomous communities for the year 2012 (Costa et al., 2015). The integration of these two methodologies allows for a synthetic estimation that, by incorporating both approaches, is considered the most robust possible.

The macroeconomic approach applies the Balassa-Samuelson hypothesis, which links price levels with GDP or income per capita levels. Two models are estimated, one using data from the states of the United States (US) and another using data from Eurozone countries. The use of data from the United States has the advantage of referring to regional observations within the same economy, and therefore, it can be assumed that they exhibit a higher degree of integration than data from different countries, even if these countries are physically further away from our study area. Additionally, using US data allows for an expansion of the Balassa-Samuelson model to include variables such as productive structure and housing prices.

The microeconomic methodology estimates the PPPs as the regional effects of an explanatory equation of total household expenditure in Spain, estimated using data from the Household Budget Survey (EPF) of the National Statistics Institute, which also considers household composition and the characteristics of the main breadwinner.

The proposed synthetic PPPs were obtained from a weighted average of the results of both macro and micro methods, where the weights take into account the reliability of the results based on the sample sizes of the EPF for each autonomous community.

In addition to presenting the PPP values for 2021, the study also shows how significant macroeconomic indicators, such as GDP per capita of the autonomous communities, are adjusted when considering the different PPP values of each region.

The results obtained for the estimated PPPs of the autonomous communities for the year 2021, presented in the following table, show that prices in Catalonia were 6.44% higher than those of the country as a whole.

Applying these purchasing power parities to GDP per capita shows that Catalonia moves from being the fourth autonomous community with the highest GDP per capita to the sixth when local prices are considered, thereby reducing the differences between autonomous communities.

DOI:
ISSN 2938-0596

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