In recent years, the United States and Japan have engaged in intense negotiations regarding restrictions on trade between the two countries. One of the claims made repeatedly by U.S. officials is that many Japanese manufacturers price their goods higher in Japan than in the United States, in effect subsidizing low prices in the United States by extremely high prices in Japan. According to the U.S. argument, Japan accomplishes this by keeping competitive U.S. goods from reaching the Japanese marketplace.

An economist decided to test the hypothesis that higher retail prices are being charged for Japanese automobiles in Japan than in the United States. She obtained independent random samples of 50 retail sales in the United States and 50 retail sales in Japan over the same time period and for the same model of automobile and converted the Japanese sales prices from yen to dollars using current conversion rates. The data, saved in the AUTOS file, are listed in Table 8.1. Form a 95% confidence interval for the difference between the population mean retail prices of this automobile model for the two countries. Interpret the result.

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Table 8.1 Automobile Retail Prices (Thousands of Dollars) USA Sales: 28.2 26.2 27.2 28.7 28.4 26.6 24.9 26.8 22.1 28.5 25.5 26.2 26.3 28.2 29.5 23.2 26.8 22.9 28.2 26.3 26.8 26.4 28.6 25.6 27.1 28.1 28.9 27.3 28.8 24.9 26.7 30.3 27.1 24.6 27.2 26.9 23.3 26.3 25.9 26.6 27.6 23.0 26.0 27.1 24.6 Japan Sales: 28.5 24.0 28.2 31.1 23.9 28.7 24.9 26.8 27.3 26.6 24.9 26.3 26.5 29.8 26.4 28.0 27.5 28.4 29.8 24.8 28.2 30.4 27.9 25.5 25.4 27.7 27.1 28.5 26.9 27.6 24.4 31.6 28.6 26.4 26.3 25.4 27.6 26.7 30.2 27.9 27.4 28.2 26.2 24.3 22.5 20.8 27.2 29.0 28.4 28.0 28.0 30.1 26.2 26.2 30.0