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
Île-de-France would be a better point of comparison then as the leading sector for service industries. $65,458 (2021), so 1.67x more. However the story this really tells is that Bucharest has an even starker difference in GDP per capita vs the rest of Romania than Paris vs the rest of France (unsurprisingly, the problem of highly underdeveloped rural areas is the same for most former communist countries).
More to the point, in 1990 the GDP/capita was $21866 for France vs $1648 (constant) for Romania. A 13x difference. Which, going back to my point of the brain drain, explains a whole lot better why in the '90s and even '00s countries like Romania got fucked hard by emigration of their skilled workforce, or at the very least why you can't use the United States as proof that brain drain due to economic disparity is not a problem (though OTOH participation in the common market is a partial explanation for these countries' economies "catching-up" in the post-communist era… it's a complex topic, I was just trying to highlight a potential drawback).
And I'm highlighting that while a drawback might have existed, it may not be as relevant today. I can see why a Romanian would move to Paris after Romania entered the EU, but the advantage today seems fuzzier.
The areas of large population growth in the USA, mainly driven by internal migration, aren't the rich cities. Instead, they are cities that offer cheaper quality of life, attracting people who can effectively see their material wealth increase even if they don't earn as high a wage.