The Classical Approach to Convergence Analysis

The concepts of s-convergence, absolute b-convergence and conditional b-convergence are discussed in this paper. The concepts are applied to a variety of data sets that include a large cross section of 110 countries, the sub-sample of OECD countries, the states within the United States, the prefectures of Japan and the regions within several European countries. Except for the large cross section of countries, all data sets display strong evidence of s-convergence and absolute b-convergence. The cross section of countries exhibits s-divergence and conditional b-convergence. The speed of conditional convergence, which is very similar across data sets, is close to 2% per year.