Relatório de preços

Deutsche Bank
Markets Research
Global

Economics

Date
3 April 2013
Sanjeev Sanyal

The Random Walk

Global Strategist
([phone] [e-mail] Mapping the World's Prices 2013
Last year we had published the first edition of “Mapping the World’s Prices” and, given the overwhelmingly positive response from readers, we have decided to publish an update and hope to do so every year. Just like the previous edition, this is a simple survey of prices and price indices of a wide array of goods and services from around the world. The data is either gleaned directly from prices posted on the internet or from sources that have collated data. In order to ensure that that prices are comparable across countries we have tried to use products that are standard across countries or have close substitutes. We are aware of the limitations of surveying prices over the internet as well as the distortions caused by discounts and other temporary variations. We faced an additional problem this year because we also attempted to make the survey comparable with last year’s data. Changes in product design and upgrades can often make this difficult. Thus, we have tried to correct for these distortions where possible and readers can refer to the notes accompanying the tables.
Despite these issues, we feel that the survey provides the reader with a reasonably unbiased view of global prices.
This year’s survey too found that Australia and Japan are very expensive across a wide range of products while the United States is generally the cheapest developed country. For a developing country, Brazil too was found to be very expensive. However, exchange rate movements did impact the cross-country comparisons this year. So, Japan appears to have somewhat reduced its price gap with the rest of the world compared to last year. A weaker currency has also made Britain and Brazil a bit more affordable in dollar terms. Broadly speaking, India remains the