On van Ijzeren’s approach to international comparisons and its properties

This paper provides a comprehensive exposition of Van IJzeren’s approach to international comparisons of purchasing power and real GDP. Important features of this approach are: symmetrical treatment of price level and volume comparison; retaining a relationship between levels and indexes; and using identical country weighting structures within the “international” prices and quantities. It is shown that the Van IJzeren method is superior to the well-known Geary-Khamis method. At the same time the paper can be seen as a defense of the EKS method.