IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/asu/wpaper/2180043.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Balassa-Samuelson Hypothesis Forty Years Later

Author

Abstract

It is well known that there are big cross-country differences in aggregate TFP. Are these differences uniform across sectors or are they driven by even larger TFP differences in specific sectors? Some forty years ago, Balassa and Samuelson hypothesized that the biggest TFP differences are in the tradable sectors. Providing empirical support for this hypothesis is hard because of the lack of data on sector inputs and outputs, at least outside the OECD. We get around this problem by employing economic theory to infer the missing information from the expenditure and price data of the 1996 Benchmark Study of the Penn World Tables. We distinguish between tradable and nontradable consumption and investment. We find that Balassa and Samuelson were right: the cross-country TFP differences are much larger in the tradable sectors than in the nontradables ones.

Suggested Citation

  • Berthold Herrendorf & Akos Valentinyi, "undated". "The Balassa-Samuelson Hypothesis Forty Years Later," Working Papers 2180043, Department of Economics, W. P. Carey School of Business, Arizona State University.
    • Handle: RePEc:asu:wpaper:2180043
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://wpcarey.asu.edu/tools/mytools/pubs_admin/FILES/TheBalassa-SamuelsonHypothesisFortyYearsLater.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:asu:wpaper:2180043. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Steve Salik (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/deasuus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.