Beyond Balassa-Samuelson: Real appreciation in tradables in transition countries1

Real currency appreciation in accession countries: Balassa-Samuelson and investment demand

The Balassa-Samuelson effect is usually seen as the prime explanation of the continuous real appreciation of central and east European (CEE) transition countries' currencies against their western counterparts. The response of a small country's real exchange rate to various shocks is derived in a simple model. It is shown that productivity shocks work not only through a Balassa-type supply chann...

Balassa-Samuelson Effect in the CEECs?

This paper offers a detailed assessment of the Balassa-Samuelson (BS) effect in eight Central and Eastern European countries (CEEC8). Several features distinguish this study from others: First, we investigate a variety of specifications of extended models. Nonhomogeneity of wages, deviations from PPP in tradables and demand side variables are found to importantly contribute to explain inflation...

Productivity, the Terms of Trade, and the Real Exchange Rate: The Balassa-Samuelson Hypothesis Revisited

The Harrod - Balassa - Samuelson Hypothesis : Real Exchange Rates and their Long - Run Equilibrium

Frictionless, perfectly competitive traded-goods markets justify thinking of purchasing power parity (PPP) as the main driver of exchange rates in the long-run. But differences in the traded/non-traded sectors of economies tend to be persistent and affect movements in local price levels in ways that upset the PPP balance (the underpinning of the Harrod-Balassa-Samuelson hypothesis, HBS). This p...

The Price of Development: the Penn-Balassa-Samuelson effect revisited∗

The Penn-Balassa-Samuelson effect is the stylized fact about the positive correlation between cross-country price level and per-capita income. This paper provides evidence that the price-income relation is actually non-linear and turns negative among low income countries. The result is robust along both cross-section and panel dimensions. Additional robustness checks show that biases in PPP est...