Econometric analysis of convergence processes across countries or regions usually refers to a transition period between an arbitrary chosen starting year and a fictitious steady state. Panel unit root tests and panel cointegration techniques have proved to belong to powerful econometric tools if...

Main topics of the following analysis are the development of spatial structure and the question whether the economic disparities between agglomerations and peripheral areas will con- or diverge. Frequently, economic disparities are measured by per capita i ncome. Because of the relationship...

This paper deals with the development of regional income disparities and convergence processes in the countries of the European Union. Overall, 861 regions – mainly at the regional level NUTS-3 – of the EU enlarged in May 2004 are analysed for the period 1995 - 2003. We use the two classical...

We study an overlapping generations model of human capital accumulation with threshold effects using regional data for West Germany. Our basic goal is to shed light on the growth of West German regions. The paper finds that the relative income distribution appears to be stratifying into a...

Die vorliegende Studie beschäftigt sich mit Wachstumsabhängigkeiten zwischen räumlich benachbarten Gebieten in Westdeutschland im Zeitraum von 1976 bis 1996. Die Hypothese für derartige Wachstumsabhängigkeiten leitet sich aus der räumlichen Dimension von Mechanismen ab, denen ein...

The present paper examines the economic development perspectives of the manufacturing sector of 31 major West German regions in the process of globalisation. Public statistics do not provide FDI data on a regional basis. Therefore our study was based on indicators based on the data from the...

The paper bases itself on recent theoretical writings in growth economics that empha-size the effects of both own R&D efforts and of interregional technology spillovers on regions´ productivity. We propose robust estimation techniques to evaluate the R&D spillovers across West German functional...

This paper provides a new attempt to examine the relationship between an economy?s exposure to foreign trade and its degree of urban concentration. In contrast to previous work, which is often based on rich cross-country data sets, the analysis is focused exclusively on European countries,...

We investigate the convergence process among EU regions between 1980-2002 taking into account the effects of spatial heterogeneity and spatial spillover effects. The spatial regimes model allows for different steady-state growth paths. In contrast to previous analyses, the regimes in this paper...

We estimate the speed of income convergence for a sample of 196 European NUTS 2 regions over the period 1985-1999. So far there is no direct estimator available for dynamic panels with strong spatial dependencies. We propose a two-step procedure, which involves first spatial filtering of the...