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The CEPII Newsletter       
November 2019        



The French edition is slightly different as it also includes material available in French only  

Europe Monnaie & Finance Trade & Globalization Migrations Economic Policy Emerging Economies Competitivness & Growth Environment & Natural Ressources
  Focus

Measuring the Balassa-Samuelson Effect: A guidance Note on the RPROD Database

RPROD is a global database that complements EQCHANGE, by providing additional measures of the Balassa-Samuelson effect.
It includes five measures of this effect based on: the relative GDP per capita, the relative labor productivity, the relative consumer-price-to-producer-price ratio, and two relative sectoral value-added deflators.
These measures are provided for a wide range of countries (up to 182 economies, depending on the considered indicator), spanning from 1973 to 2018 and using several weighting schemes associated with each country's main trading partners.This guidance note outlines the construction and contents of RPROD. This new database developed by CEPII complements the EQCHANGE database, by providing additional measures of the Balassa-Samuelson effect. RPROD delivers the following indicators computed for each country included in the database, and relative to its main trading partners: (i) GDP per capita, (ii) labor productivity, (iii) consumer-price-to-producer-price ratio, (iv) three-sectors' value-added deflator, and (v) six-sectors' value-added deflator. These different measures are publicly available (http://www.cepii.fr/CEPII/fr/bdd_modele/presentation.asp?id=34), with the aim to contribute to the investigation of the Balassa-Samuelson hypothesis, and to the comparison of estimated equilibrium real exchange rates and currency misalignments across alternative proxies of this effect.
Cécile Couharde, Anne-Laure Delatte, Carl Grekou, Valérie Mignon & Florian Morvillier
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  Edito





During the early 1990s Germany offered temporary protection to over 600,000 Yugoslavian refugees fleeing war. By 2000, many had been repatriated. We exploit this natural experiment to investigate the role of migrants in post-conflict reconstruction in the former Yugoslavia, using exports as outcome. Using confidential social security data to capture intensity of refugee workers to German industries –and exogenous allocation rules for asylum seekers within Germany as instrument– we find an elasticity of exports to return migration between 0.08 to 0.24. Our results are stronger in knowledge-intensive industries and for workers in occupations intensive in analytical and managerial skills.
Dany Bahar, Andreas Hauptmann, Cem Özgüzel & Hillel Rapoport
 
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ISSN: 1255-7072
Editorial Director : Antoine Bouët
Managing Editor : Dominique Pianelli