Pricing to Market Concept
One important aspect of Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) doctrine is its espousal of law of one price, i.e. assuming one-way transport costs and tariffs. A HMT watch will be priced the same whether it is sold either in Mumbai or New York. But in the literature of international finance two stylized facts are prominently mentioned. First, real exchange rate movements are seen to be very persistent at the aggregate level of the economy. Second, individual prices of traded commodities tend to be sticky in terms of local currency at the micro level. Engel (1993) has compared the relative prices of different commodities within the same country versus relative price of the same commodity across different countries and he has reached the conclusion that the former measure is less variable in all but a few cases such as primary commodities and energy. Also Engel finds Continue reading