Maybe you can help me. I am in the process of writing a paper (later on a book)
on the cost of international courts and tribunals. I am a legal scholar and not
an economist so you'll excuse if what I ask you might seem to be trivial.
I need to translate to current US dollar figures (for comparison sake with
current international courts and tribunals) the following statements:
"From 1922 to 1940, the budget of the Permanent Court of International Justice
ranged from 900,000 to 1,330,000 dutch florins, the actual expenditures being
from 600,000 to 1,200,000 florins. In twenty years the court's expenses
totalled about $10,000,000"
"The 1938 League of Nations budget was 37,000,000 Swiss francs."
"The 1907 Convention establishing the Central American Court of Justice provided
that each judge should receive a salary of 8,000 gold dollars (Costa Rican pesos).
It was also provided that each State should also pay 2,000 gold dollars (Costa
Rican pesos) annually for the expenses of the Court".
Specifically, I need to know what was the value in current dollar terms of a
gold dollar (Costa Rican peso) in the period 1908-1918. That will help me work
out the answer to a number of other questions
The Answer
Your question is not at all trivial. My general advice is, first, to
convert the foreign-currency amount to dollars via the exchange rate for the
year or years when the expenditure or budget occurred, second, to convert the
result to current dollars by multplication by the ratio of the U.S. GDP
deflator in the current year to the GDP deflator in the years of the
expenditure or budget. You could use some other price index, such as the
consumer price index, in lieu of the deflator. For the 1922-1940 amount, I
suggest that a simple average be taken of the annual exchange rate and
deflator. I am not sure what you mean by "current." You may not be able to get
data for the year 2003.
You can get most of the required data via exploration of the How Much Is
That? section of EH.Net. You should be careful with currency units. For
example, your budget figure is in florins, but the EH.Net data are in
guilders. You would have to find out the relationship betweeen with the
denominations.
Unfortunately, there is no readily available source for the Costa Rican
peso exchange rate in 1908-1918. My suggestion is to consult League of Nations
publications; failing that, perhaps Costa Rican government documents, or
perhaps financial newspapers.
Send comments and questions to admin@eh.net
