Purchasing power parities (US dollar per Canadian dollar) by expenditure category, on an International Comparison Program Classification basis^{1, 2, 3}

This table is based on the Eurostat-Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries Classification of gross domestic product by Expenditure 2014 used in their multilateral Purchasing Power Parities program and it is consistent with the international statistics framework of the System of National Accounts 2008 (SNA 2008).

The International Comparison Program of the World Bank classifies final consumption expenditures by consuming sector rather than by the spending sector. This approach helps to align the categories more closely between countries, enabling more relevant analysis for some purposes, such as health and education.

This table provides indexes of real expenditure per capita in the United States relative to those in Canada for categories of the gross domestic income (GDI). The term 'real expenditure' is used here to express expenditure of different countries in the same set of prices through the process of conversion with purchasing power parities (PPP). The use of the term 'real' in a spatial context is analogous to its conventional use in time series, where expenditures made in different time periods are expressed in base period prices in order to measure their real growth. United States per capita expenditures in current dollars are converted to Canadian dollars by dividing them by the Fisher PPP. These converted expenditures are then expressed as a ratio of Canadian expenditures per capita. The detailed categories of GDI are those defined by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and Eurostat, and vary slightly from the ones usually published for Canada in the National Economic Accounts and for the United States in the National Income and Product Accounts.

Purchasing power parities (PPPs) are estimates of the amount of United States currency required to buy the same quantity of a given commodity that one Canadian dollar purchases in Canada. These data are based on the triennial benchmark estimates for the United States and Canada from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) from 1993 on. Extrapolations from benchmark estimates are made using changes in the associated implicit price indexes of the two countries.

This item includes intellectual property products, mineral exploration and evaluation, furniture, other intangible assets (i.e. research and development) as well as computer software and computer programming services.