A new debate over the speed of convergence in per capita income across economies is going on. Cross sectional estimates support the idea of slow convergence of about two percent per year. Panel data estimates support the idea of fast convergence of five, ten or even twenty percent per year. This...

Many contributions in the recent literature have investigated over the relationship between growth and its volatility, without getting a clear and unambiguous answer. Besides reassessing the well-known effect of output volatility on growth as benchmark analysis, this study aims at looking into...

This paper investigates the extent of per-capita income convergence in regional integration initiatives. Panel unit root testing is performed on 28 regional groupings. There is evidence of convergence in South- South integration, but this might be taking place to the bottom.

Despite the abundant literature on convergence across the Spanish regions, most of the empirical research has used cross-section regressions or data panel techniques with fixed effects, resulting in biased estimates. In addition, many of these studies do not explicitly account for the effect of...

This paper investigates the evolution of regional income inequality in Turkey during the last two decades. We present spatially robust evidence that supports the traditional income convergence hypotheses, absolute and conditional, using economic data from national accounts disaggregated at 81...

The aim of this paper is to empirically identify convergence clubs in per capita incomes of European regions and to investigate whether initial conditions - as suggested by the club convergence hypothesis - are responsible for club formation. To tackle this issue, we propose a two-step procedure...

Inflation differentials in the Euro area are mainly due to a sustained divergence of wage developments across the Euro area, and narrower differences in labour productivity growth (Alvarez et al., 2006). We investigate convergence of inflation using unit labour cost (ULC) growth and applying...

The study considers the relationship between trade liberalization and economic growth among three sub-Saharan African countries: Ghana, Nigeria, and Cote d'Ivoire. We find no statistically significant increase in the economic growth of the countries following trade liberalization. However,...

This paper demonstrates that, unlike what the conventional wisdom says, measurement error biases in panel data estimation of convergence using OLS with fixed effects are huge, not trivial. It does so by way of the "skipping estimation": taking data from every m years of the sample (where m is an...

In this paper we test the convergence hypothesis by using a revised 4-step procedure of panel unit root test suggested by Evans and Karras (1996). We use data on output for 24 OECD countries over 40 years long. Whether the convergence, if any, is conditional or absolute is also examined....