Swiftonomics and Beyonce bump: How stars power economies
Taylor Swift and Beyonce raking it in with tours that are giving local economies a boost.
Big-spending Swifties
Swiftmania is at an all-time high, and it is leaping from the stadium to the cinema, where a film on Swift's Eras tour out Friday in over 100 countries worldwide has already clocked up more than $100 million in ticket pre-sales.
The tour itself, which finishes in December 2024, is poised to become the first tour to make $1 billion.
According to Maria Psyllou, an economist at Britain's Birmingham University who has written about the trickle-down effect of Swift's tour, the six concerts in Los Angeles added $320 million to that county's GDP.
«A big phenomenon,» was how New York Federal Reserve President John Williams described the Taylor Swift effect last month.
Queen B stings
The war in Ukraine is usually cited as a key factor for the cost-of-living crisis in Europe but in Sweden, the party held up as responsible for higher-than-expected inflation in May was none other than Beyonce.
Consumer prices rose by a higher-than-expected 9.7 percent in May year-on-year, with increased costs of certain goods and services, such as clothing and hotel visits, offsetting a decrease in electricity and food prices.
Michael Grahn, chief economist for Sweden at Danske Bank, said Beyonce's first two dates on her first solo tour in seven years were probably to blame.
Tens of thousands of fans flocked to Stockholm for the gigs, adding between 0.2 and 0.3 percentage points to the inflation caused by hotel and restaurant prices, according to Grahn.
K-pop fever In its decade-long existence, K-pop boy band BTS — on pause as several members do their compulsory military service — has added billions of dollars to the South Korean
