The differences appear to be almost the VAT. ANd this for a more or less American product, specifically from the electronics category people go to New York to buy.
I suspect the VAT is really what gives people the idea that everything is cheap in the US.

Now, those people who measure PPP are probably not stupid, and probably many things, including books, are cheaper in the US, if only because of the larger market. But I wonder what part of the difference is in land pricesand other things affected by this, and reflecting the lower population density of the US

If you take the 19% VAT in the Netherlands into account, those are pretty big differences for the same product, from the same store, probably made and shipped from the same China.

(On a side note: the Dutch standard mattress size is apparently 11 cm taller than the US version, while the US one is 7 cm wider. I wonder what that means)

Of course, ignoring positional considerations is exactly what I’m doing by looking at absolute rather than relative numbers. Which is the point of doing so of course, for relative measures depend upon position.

There is approximately one way to look at the figures that makes it look as if being poor in the US is a good as being poor in Sweden. That involves ignoring the market, positional considerations, labour, state services, security and longevity. I think that might be counted as cherry picking. The use of absolute is irritating because all the statistics actually say is that the poor have equal access to Big Macs in both places.

But Amazon UK is competing with PCWorld (UK), and is going to be far less affected by planning laws/high cost of retail space. That’s what I meant by online.

Using the official poverty line, the United States falls to second in the poverty ratings, with the United Kingdom having higher overall poverty rates using this standard, as shown in Table 2. At the 125 percent line, the United States ranks fourth among these nations. The United States looks somewhat better using either of these “absolute” measures than with the relative measure due to its higher overall standard of living, a general finding that has been confirmed in other studies (Kenworthy 2004). In terms of vulnerable groups, however poverty for United States children remains very high (ranking second by either standard) even within this set of rich nations. And poor United States residents, especially poor children, do not compare well to those in other nations based on PPP-adjusted real incomes (Rainwater and Smeeding 2003; Smeeding
and Rainwater 2004).

Well, there are people who will disagree there. Like Smeeding, who looked at the numbers from the Luxembourg Income Study. I’ve forgotten the exact numbers (they ended up as a chart in the EPI’s State of Working America report one year) but, at PPP, the poorest 10% in the US have the same percentage of US median income as the poorest 10% of Swedes have of US median income. That’s the after tax, after benefit number.
He does look at things like health care and university education, also notes that US food costs are lower and thinks that those are largely a wash.
Now, agreed that’s the bottom 10%, not the average person. But to say that the poor are poorer in the US in an absolute sense (as opposed to relative) seems not to be true.

Mindstorms Lego is Danish.
Canon is Japanese.

Look at the Playstation 3, for another Japanese example.

Why don’t we do it the other way around? Is there any widely tradeable good that is more expensive in the U.S.? (OK local grocery products would be more expensive, because they have to bought in the home country and then shipped to the U.S.) Or do we really need international bureaucrats?

It’s well founded in theory but with some confusing intuition and quite a bit of contrary evidence. But the principle is clear. If interest rates are similar, then there could not be any expected change in the exchange rate, otherwise all the funds would flow in one direction or the other to take advantage of it (e.g. expected USD depreciation would cause outflow). And in the magical efficient markets way, such an instantaneous flow would eliminate the expected change.

As it happens, exchange rate changes are quite difficult to systematically forecast. But whether interest rate differentials play much of a role in that is another story.