Prices in the West are maximized with the goal of reaching the peak point on the supply vs demand curve. Prices in the East, and China in particular, are minimized [presumably?] with the goal of maximizing longterm marketshare. One of the easiest examples of this is water [1] because it's a relatively low-labor, low-processing industry. Yet a bottle of water in the West tends to cost about 700% more than a bottle of water in Asia. As a result of this I can buy a bottle of water in the middle of the desert in the Mideast for a tiny fraction of what I'd pay in Michigan which, alone, has ~20% of the entire world's fresh water supply.

This is also why GDP is extremely misleading. PPP is supposed to account for these differences but often is often wrong by a rather wide margin for many critical industries.

[1] - https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/bottled-w...