Contacts: In Washington: Fred Vogel, 202 473 3808 fvogel@worldbank.org Richard Fix, (202) 473-3399 rfix@worldbank.org
WASHINGTON, June 28 2006 – Data on household consumption in Latin America were released today in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil as part of the International Comparison Program (ICP). The preliminary data from ICP surveys cover ten South American countries: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela.. The regional project was coordinated by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) and Statistics Canada (StatsCan). The International Comparison Program (ICP), which is organized world wide by the World Bank, is an international effort to gather prices for a large basket of comparable goods and services. It was created to estimate purchasing power parities (PPP) in order to express national expenditure values for each component of the Gross Domestic Product in a common currency. This program covers more than 100 countries in five regions (South America, the republics of the former Soviet Union, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East). At the same time the ICP is being carried out with similar methodology in the countries of the European Union and the OECD, including Mexico. In the European Union, parities are used to guide the Community's structural development policy. The World Bank also uses purchasing power parity to define international poverty lines. Similarly, the ICP offers a way of comparing the purchasing power in different countries, making it possible to show, for example, if one country is more expensive than another, or why one currency is undervalued against another's. “The results of the ICP exercise will provide comparable information on purchasing power parity and breakdowns of GDP expenditures,” said Fred Vogel, the Global Manager of the International Comparison program. “These results will be very useful to national and international analysts, as this program investigated more than 800 goods and services.” South America is the first region for which results are published, thanks to cooperation among the different national statistics offices and central banks in the ten participating countries, along with the coordinating bodies, helped along by a common culture and spirit of dialogue and cooperation among Latin American technical experts. The ICP started in early 2003, with regional support from ECLAC's Americas Statistics Conference, at that time chaired by Brazil. Later this year, other regions will release their results leading up to the release of the global figures in 2007. A presentation of the results took place in the headquarters of the Brazilian Institute for Geography and Statistics (IBGE), in the presence of the directors of the national statistical institutes and central bank presidents from the ten participating countries, along with representatives from ECLAC, StatsCan, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. ### For more information please visit the ICP web site. |
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