Catching-Up and Inflation in Transition Economies: The Balassa-Samuelson Effect Revisited
26 Pages Posted: 27 Jan 2009
Date Written: December 2008
Abstract
This paper estimates the Balassa-Samuelson effects for 11 countries in central and eastern Europe on a disaggregated set of quarterly data covering the period from the mid-1990s to the first quarter of 2008. The Balassa-Samuelson effects are clearly present and explain around 24% of inflation differentials vis-a-vis the euro area (about 1.2 percentage points on average); and around 84% of domestic relative price differentials between non-tradables and tradables; or about 16% of total domestic inflation (about 1.1 percentage points on average). The paper presents mixed evidence on whether the Balassa-Samuelson effects have declined since 2001 compared with the second half of the 1990s.
Keywords: Balassa-Samuelson effect, productivity, inflation, transition, convergence, European monetary union, Maastricht criteria
JEL Classification: E31, F36, O11, P20
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
Do you have negative results from your research you’d like to share?
Recommended Papers
-
International Evidence on Tradables and Nontradables Inflation
-
By Matthew B. Canzoneri, Robert E. Cumby, ...
-
International Evidence on Tradables and Nontradable Inflation
-
Exchange Rates and Economic Fundamentals: A Methodological Comparison of Beers and Feers
By Peter B. Clark and Ronald Macdonald
-
Real Exchange Rates in the Developing Countries: Concepts and Measure- Ment
-
The EMS, the Emu, and the Transition to a Common Currency
By Kenneth Froot and Kenneth Rogoff
-
Real Exchange Rates and Productivity Growth in the United States and Japan
-
Asset Markets, Exchange Rates and the Balance of Payments
By Jacob A. Frenkel and Michael L. Mussa
-
By Enrique Alberola, Humberto Lopez, ...
-
Long-Run Exchange Rate Modeling: A Survey of the Recent Evidence