鲍莫尔病(Baumol's disease）是美国经济学家威廉·鲍莫尔在1967年一篇研究经济增长的论文中提出来的。他建立了一个两部门宏观经济增长模型，其中一个部门是“进步部门”(progressive　sector)，另外一个部门是“停滞部门”(nonprogressive　sector，后来鲍莫尔常用stagnant　sector)，进步部门的生产率相对快速增长将导致停滞部门出现相对成本的不断上升。他认为，如市政府服务、教育、表演艺术、饭店和休闲等很多服务部门都具有这一特征，整体上看，相对于制造业，服务业劳动生产率更难以提高，正如在表演艺术市场上，三百年前的莫扎特四重奏要四个人演，三百年后依然要四个人!因而，随着制造业的生产率改进，服务业在整个经济中的比重反而上升了。

　　Baumol's cost disease (also known as the Baumol Effect) is a phenomenon described by William J. Baumol and William G. Bowen in the 1960s. It involves a rise of salaries in jobs that have experienced no increase of labor productivity in response to rising salaries in other jobs which did experience such labor productivity growth. This goes against the theory in classical economics that wages are always closely tied to labor productivity changes.

　　The rise of wages in jobs without productivity gains is caused by the necessity to compete for employees with jobs that did experience gains and hence can naturally pay higher salaries, just as classical economics predicts. For instance, if the music industry pays its musicians 19th century style salaries, the musicians may decide to quit and get a job at an automobile factory where salaries are commensurate to high labor productivity. Hence, musicians' salaries are increased not due to labor productivity increases in the music industry, but rather due to productivity and wage increases in other industries.

　　The original study was conducted for the performing arts sector. Baumol and Bowen pointed out that the same number of musicians are needed to play a Beethoven string quartet today as were needed in the 1800s; that is, the productivity of Classical music performance has not increased. On the other hand, wages of musicians (as well as in all other professions) have increased greatly since the 19th century.

　　In a range of businesses, such as the car manufacturing sector and the retail sector, workers are continually getting more productive due to technological innovations to their tools and equipment. In contrast, in some labor-intensive sectors that rely heavily on human interaction or activities, such as nursing, education, or the performing arts there is little or no growth in productivity over time. As with the string quartet example, it takes nurses the same amount of time to change a bandage, or college professors the same amount of time to mark an essay, in 2006 as it did in 1966.

　　Baumol's cost disease is often used to describe the lack of growth in productivity in public services such as public hospitals and state colleges. Since many public administration activities are heavily labor-intensive there is little growth in productivity over time. As a result growth in the GDP will generate little more resources to be spent in public sector. Thus public sector production is more dependent on taxation level than growth in the GDP.

Producers can react to wage inflation in a number of ways:

• Decrease quantity/supply
• Decrease quality
• Increase price
• Increase non-monetary compensation or employ volunteers
• Increase total factor productivity

In the case of education, the Baumol Effect has been used as at least partial justification for the fact that, in recent decades, college tuition has risen faster than the general rate of inflation.

The reported productivity gains of the service industry in the late 1990s can be mostly attributed to total factor productivity. Providers decreased the cost of ancillary labor through outsourcing or technology. Examples include offshoring data entry and bookkeeping for health care providers, and replacing manually-marked essays in educational assessment with multiple choice tests that can be automatically marked (see Scantron).

The total factor productivity treatment is not available to the performing arts sector, because the consumable good is the labor itself. Instead, it has been observed that increases in price of the performing arts has been offset by increases in standard of living and entertainment spending by consumers. The extent to which the other treatments have been employed is subjective.