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

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...

The Penn-Balassa-Samuelson Effect in Developing Countries: Price and Income Revisited

It is conventional wisdom that richer countries have a higher price level than poorer countries. This paper provides evidence that the price-income relationship is non-linear and that it turns negative, or at best flat, in low income countries. The result is robust along both cross-section and time-series dimensions. Additional robustness checks show that biases in PPP estimation and measuremen...

The Balassa-Samuelson Hypothesis in Developed Countries and Emerging Market Economies: Different Outcomes Explained

This paper studies the Balassa-Samuelson hypothesis in two areas with strong differences in economic development, sixteen OECD countries and sixteen Latin American economies. Applying panel cointegration and bootstrapping techniques that solve for cross-sectional dependence problems in the data, we find that the second stage of the hypothesis, which relates relative sector prices with the real ...

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