Monday 7 July 2008

Petrol prices are high?

Many people seems to think that petrol prices are "high" right now. In his posting, And You Thought Today's Gas Prices Were High?, Mark Perry at the CARPE DIEM blog gives, for the US at least, a little perspective on today's "high prices".

Consider this graph from the Perry posting:The graph shows the cost of 1,000 gallons of petrol in the US as a percent of US per-capita disposable income, annually back to 1929.

Perry writes
The retail price of gas was only about 20 cents a gallon from 1929 to 1946, but annual per-capita disposable income in the 1930s was only about about $400-500 (about $6,000 in today's dollars), so that a 1,000 gallons of gas cost as much as almost 49% of per-capita disposable income in 1933, and averaged more than 38% from 1929-1939~!

To reach those levels today, gas would have to sell for between $14 and $17 per gallon!
Is there any reason to think that the same basic patten wouldn't show up in the data for New Zealand?

No comments: