Economic Dynamics and Performance Clubs in a Set of American Countries

The aim of this paper is to study the economic dynamics of a set of countries of the American continent during the period 1951-2003. We introduce an alternative concept of growth convergence based on the notion of dynamic regimes. Regimes are defined in the state space of growth rates and real per capita GDP. By introducing a non-parametric method of clustering we detect two main convergence clubs. One of them can be identified as the group of high performance countries and shows a relatively more homogeneous structure. Countries in this group tend to exhibit similar performances. On the contrary, the second group exhibits a high dispersion in performances suggesting the existence of sub-clusters and some kind of divergence among them. We also study the mobility between the low and high performance clubs and find a higher probability of changing from low to high than suggested in the traditional literature on convergence