Bela Balassa
He was an important thinker on exchange rates, and explained why life was in some important ways cheaper in poor countries.
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Can somebody please explain the difference between the Baumol effect and the Balassa-Samuelson effect described in this lecture? It looks the same to me. Thank you.
I think the difference is that Baumol refers to different sectors in the same economy (why does a Norwegian barber salary rise when the Norweign oil sector becomes more efficient?) while Balassa is the same sector in different economies (why is a Norwegian barber paid more than a Mexian barber?).
With question #2 of the practice questions in mind, what are some factors that might result in a country having many middle class families with servants, while also having high labor productivity? For example, Hong Kong.
I haven't studied the issue, but high levels of income inequality in the population could possibly contribute. The prevailing wage for low skilled service would be within the means of the middle class. Hong Kong has one of the highest gini coefficients. https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/21...
Ok, HK is not a country! Maybe there are better examples.
As the difference in haircut price is clear for me, I don't get the point why there is higher rate of employing house servants in Mexico than in Norway. I agree that price of house serving should be higher in the latter, but still the proportion between wages of upper mid-class (e.g. engineer in oil company) and wages of servant should be more or less the same in both countries (as the upper mid-class in Mexico is much less efficient in Mexico than in Norway), so it shouldn't determine differences in willingness to employ servants. Going this way of thinking we could say that probably people in Norway go to barber less often than in Mexico, what rather wouldn't be true. Could someone explain it to me? For me it's rather for cultural differences, but of course I might be wrong
Thanks. That's what I thought, too. It remains unclear to me, however, why don't we call it International Baumol Effect or something like that.