The extent of beta- and sigma-convergence of average labor productivity across manufacturing industries in 18 OECD-countries over the period 1972-1992 show large inter-industry differences. One reason for these differences is knowledge and capital barriers preventing catch-up to occur. We find...

In a recent paper Lichtenberg (1994) proposes a test of the convergence hypothesis that the variance of productivity across countries decreases over time. He argues that the ratio of the variance in the first period to that in the last period of the time series is F-distributed but overlooks the...