Agricultural and Economic Convergence in the EU Integration Process: Do Geographical Relationships Matter?

In the light of the reaffirmed importance of agricultural convergence within the integration process, the paper provides a preliminary investigation of the impact of the enlargement from the EU-15 to the EU-27 on agricultural real b-convergence and, with reference to the EU-27, of its relationship with economic catching-up process. The empirical analysis, based on a GWR approach, takes into account the regional spatial interdependences in estimating local parameters of convergence. The approach adopted allows to overcome the contradictory results from OLS estimations and parametric spatial econometric models pointed out by the literature and primarily connected to the existence of no unique convergence rate all over Europe. The analysis is based on a sample of 259 EU-27 regions at NUTS 2 level and is referred to the time period from 1991-2007.