Agricultural productivity growth in the Mediterranean and tests of convergence among countries

This paper measures agricultural productivity among a set of thirteenMediterranean countries which includes two EU- 15 countries (Greece and Spain), anothertwo EU- 25 (Cyprus and Malta) one country under accession negotiations (Turkey) andeight Middle East and North Africa (MENA) countries (Algeria, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Libya,Morocco, Syria and Tunisia) from 1961 to 2002. The objective of the paper is twofold:Firstly, to analyse agricultural productivity growth in the Mediterranean countries bymeans of the sequential Malmquist Total Factor Productivity (TFP) index and secondly, toinvestigate whether this measure is converging among these countries. In terms of thefirst objective, TFP indices are decomposed into efficiency changes and technical changes,in an attempt to identify the best - practise countries and the overall effect of technologicalimprovements. In terms of the second, both cross- section and time series tests ofconvergence are applied. The former include the conventional β- and σ- convergencetests, while for the latter, a new method proposed by Nahar and Inder (2002) that allowsfor country - specific estimates is used. Neither test finds evidence for unconditionalconvergence, but two distinctive periods, one prior and one after 1980 are recognized.The time series approach identifies four countries to be converging to the mean andanother two to be diverging.