The Mirage of Convergence: Why Poor Countries May Only Seem to Be Closing the Income Gap

Jan Hanousek, Dana Hájková and Randall Filer

CERGE-EI Working Papers from The Center for Economic Research and Graduate Education - Economics Institute, Prague

Abstract: Results of numerous cross-country growth regressions have been found to be sensitive to specification, time period or sample coverage. Several authors have observed that results may depend on the source and data collection methods for right-hand side variables. In this paper we suggest that a more fundamental problem may exist with respect to the growth rates used in the majority of studies. Differences in measured growth rates are severe across widely-used sources. More critically, these differences are correlated with countries’ level of development. As an illustration, we show that the results of two recent studies depend critically on which data set is used to derive the growth measure.

Keywords: Growth; Measurement; Developing Economies. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C82 O47 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2004-10
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.cerge-ei.cz/pdf/wp/Wp222.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cer:papers:wp222

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CERGE-EI Working Papers from The Center for Economic Research and Graduate Education - Economics Institute, Prague Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Lucie Vasiljevova ().