President William Ruto says change aims to boost trade and allow goods, services, people and ideas to move freely across continent
President William Ruto says change aims to boost trade and allow goods, services, people and ideas to move freely across continent
We’d probably need a degree in economics to model this, but intuitively I’d think it’s both a matter of relative difference in wealth being much smaller between Cali & Louisiana than between Germany&Romania, as well as the absolute living conditions being much better in Louisiana than Romania.
There’s poor, and there’s poor. Nowhere in the US or Western Europe is even remotely poor like post-communist Romania was poor. That changes the game a lot when deciding where to live and work.
Let’s compare GDP per capita. These are just basic numbers I pulled from Google.
Bay Area/New Orleans = $89,978 (2017) / $52,535 (2017) = 1.71
Frankfurt/Bucharest = $55,200 (2020) / $39,200 (2020) = 1.41
So the San Francisco Bay Area has a higher income disparity compared to Greater New Orleans than Frankfurt has to Bucharest. Maybe there is an absolute number that people target, but the relative difference is much worse in the USA.
Lmao Frankfurt is not to Germany what the Bay area is to Cali. The Bay Area is so ridiculously overpriced it tops the worldwide charts.
Comparing at a country/state level, Louisiana-Cali is a 1.5x difference while Romania-Germany is a 2.7x difference in nominal GDP per capita… and it was way worse right after the fall of communism. Like, “oh shit oh fuck why are there so many orphanages and so many homeless orphans” kind of worse.