Purchasing power

About: Purchasing power is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 2714 publications have been published within this topic receiving 36866 citations. The topic is also known as: adjusted for inflation.

Income and Demand Policies in Brazil

Abstract: This chapter is divided into four main sections. In section 3.2 are presented three different ways to correct the continuous loss of purchasing power of wages in an inflationary environment. We concentrate our attention on the two mechanisms that have been used in Brazil: The ‘peak adjustment’ and the ‘average adjustment’. In the former case, wages are corrected, taking into consideration only past inflation. In the latter, future inflation must be forecast to permit the calculation of the nominal wage adjustment necessary to keep its purchasing power at the previous prevailing value. These different methodologies lead to completely different situations with respect to combating inflation, and are a key step in understanding the inflationary process in Brazil. The ‘peak adjustment’ is generally referred to in the literature as lagged (backward-looking) indexation. The ‘average adjustment’ is better defined as an incomes policy than as a method of indexing wages. It also is referred to as ‘forward-looking indexation’.

Money, Wages, and Real Incomes in the Age of Erasmus: The Purchasing Power of Coins and of Building Craftsmen's Wages in England and the Low Countries, 1500 - 1540

Abstract: This comparative study of money, coinages, prices, and wages in southern England and the southern Low Countries had its origins in a series of appendices and footnotes for the first twelve volumes of the Correspondence of Erasmus (1484-1527), part of the Collected Works of Erasmus, which the University of Toronto Press has been publishing since 1974. The questions first put to me were: can we identify and evaluate the various silver and gold coins that appear in Erasmus's correspondence, and references to his travels over an arc running from England, the Habsburg Netherlands, France, the Rhineland, Switzerland, and Italy? What were these coins in terms of their precious metal contents and exchange rates, with each other, and in relation to the moneys of account of England, France, and the Low Countries? The more economically interesting questions that developed were: (1) What was the purchasing power of these various coins in terms of everyday commodities? (2) What was the real value of the various benefices and stipends that Erasmus received from his benefactors: was he really so ill-paid, as he frequently intimated? (3) How would his 'standard of living' compare with that of skilled master craftsmen -- a mason or carpenter in Oxford and in Antwerp of this era - at least in terms of the purchasing powers of their money incomes? This study covers the Golden Age of Erasmus (1466-1536) in the first four decades of the sixteenth century, an era that also marked the onset of the famous Price Revolution, perhaps the most significant inflationary era in European economic history. It commences with an analysis of the original sources for the price and wage data utilized in this study, and the problem of 'wage stickiness', so that real wages were essentially a function of changes in the price level (rather than in the MRP of the craftsmen). The next part analyses the nature of relative price changes and of inflation during the first decades of the Price Revolution era, discussing the role of both demographic and monetary changes, but offering essentially a monetary explanation of that inflation. Then follows detailed analyses of the actual changes in the gold and silver coinages of England, France, and the Habsburg Netherlands from 1500 to 1540; changes in the coined money supplies and changes in credit, with the origins of a genuine financial revolution in the early 16th-century Netherlands. The rest of this paper focusses on the purchasing power of both coins and of building craftsmen's wages in England and the southern Netherlands over this four-decade period, in terms of the following commodities: wine, butter, beef, herrings, cod fish, eggs, wheat, peas, loaf sugar, paper, tallow candles, woollen, worsted, and linen textiles. For both regions, various estimates of these craftsmen's real wages and real incomes are made: in terms of these commodities and of a more broadly based 'basket of consumables'; and of the price indices derived from them for Brabant (Van der Wee) and England (Phelps Brown and Hopkins, as amended by my own research on their working papers in the LSE Archives). The comparative purchasing power of these wages is made for similar commodities in each region, estimating for which the English craftsmen was the gainer or loser in relation to his counterparts in the Antwerp-Lier-Brussels region. If English craftsmen, suffering a greater degree of wage-stickiness, thus suffered a greater fall in real incomes with the onset of the Price Revolution, they were not necessarily worse off in absolute terms by the late 1530s. The final table 17 compares their incomes with those of Erasmus, in terms of references to his various stipends and benefices mentioned in his correspondence for the year 1526, a tabulation that is far from complete. But that tabulation indicates that these incomes -- when Erasmus had been a Professor of Greek and Divinity at Cambridge -- amounted to the annual wage incomes for 82 Antwerp master masons and carpenters or 93 Oxford masons/carpenters. Today senior professors at the University of Toronto earn about 2.5 times the annual wage incomes of master carpenters. A very golden age for Erasmus indeed.

Communication at Farmers’ Markets: Commodifying Relationships, Community and Morality

Abstract: Consumers are increasingly using their purchasing power to enact their politics and activism. I examine how consumption at farmers’ markets fits into this trend. The consumption of local and organi...

THE rice problem in the Philippines: trends, constraints, and policy imperatives

Abstract: Every political dispensation in recent decades has taken the view that the country has to be able to feed itself. For the country’s political leaders and the agriculture bureaucracy, this has meant that rice, the country’s staple food, has to be locally produced at quantity sufficient to meet the rice requirement of the burgeoning population. Indeed, rice self-sufficiency has been an objective enshrined in all government programs for the agricultural sector since the early 1960s. To achieve the objective, the Government has intervened, albeit in varying degrees, in the marketplace to affect virtually all segments of the supply chain, including importation, and of the demand spectrum. Yet, self-sufficiency has remained elusive. The population is far from being more food-secure now than a decade or two ago. Over the years, rice has become more expensive in the Philippines than in most developing countries of Asia. This has caused reduction in the purchasing power of the incomes of the poor, including landless farmers and urban poor workers whose spending on rice constitutes about 22% of their total household expenditure. Arguably, this could partly explain for the much higher incidence of absolute poverty in the Philippines than in Indonesia, Thailand, and even Vietnam. What has gone wrong? In this paper, we examine the performance of the rice sector over the last three decades. Our aim is to identify policy imperatives and investment options for the sector in the wake of globalization and population pressure. While a number of observations found in the paper are not new and have already been pointed out elsewhere, we move beyond the usual description of past performance to include as well an ex-ante assessment of the effects of trade policy reforms on the rice economy in the short and medium terms.