One of the weirder experiences for anyone who lives in the eurozone is a visit to a German supermarket. I had the pleasure the other day, and found the general price level there to be a little over half of what it is in Belgium, Italy or Spain. This, of course, is just an unscientific guess. I also found price differences of some 30 per cent when comparing certain categories of goods on various Ebay sites in the eurozone.
These differences go some way to explaining the eurozone’s divergent economic performance, and give a pointer as to what to expect in the future. The really intriguing aspect of the divergences is not how they happened, but why they are not correcting themselves. We know how they happened: Germany entered the eurozone at an uncompetitive exchange rate and embarked on a long period of wage moderation. Macroeconomists would say Germany benefited from a real devaluation against other members. But while real exchange rates tend to move around, one would not normally expect extreme misalignments to be persistent. In this case, one would expect Spanish and Italian consumers to abandon their expensive retail stores and swamp German internet sites with mail order purchases, especially for durable goods. Eventually there would be some price realignment.
It is not happening.