Béla Balassa

Béla Alexander Balassa (6 April 1928 – 10 May 1991) was a Hungarian economist who served as a professor at Johns Hopkins University, and was a consultant to the World Bank.

Balassa is best known for his work on the relationship between purchasing power parity and cross-country productivity differences (the Balassa–Samuelson effect). He is also known for his work on revealed comparative advantage.

Balassa received a law degree from the University of Budapest. He left Hungary after the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and went to Austria. While there, he received a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to study at Yale University, where he received M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in economics in 1958 and 1959, respectively. He won the John Addison Porter Prize for 1959. Balassa also did extensive consulting work for the World Bank, serving as an advisor on development and trade policy. According to an authoritative history of the Bank, Balassa was "a protagonist of the Bank's conceptual transformation in the trade-policy area during the 1970s."

Beyond economics, Balassa was a noted gourmet who compiled and periodically updated an unofficial guide to eating well in Paris while remaining within an international agency expense allowance, which circulated among his friends and colleagues.