Economic convergence among the world’s top-income economies

Evangelia Desli () and Alexandra Gkoulgkoutsika

The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, 2021, vol. 80, issue C, 841-853

Abstract: As the world leading economies are changing, the paper studies the scarcely analyzed economies identified as the world’s top-income economies based on the World Bank classification, over the period 1980–2016, instead of the frequently used, but not uniformly defined and more importantly outdated, “developed” countries distinction, and shows that a new group of economies displays convergence. The analysis is performed from three different angles that act in a complementary way, namely, the beta-convergence approach with the ability to detect a deterministic trend and user defined clubs, the log(t) approach that can detect both deterministic and stochastic trends with automatically generated clubs, and finally the pairwise approach that seeks stochastic trends with user defined potential clubs. All methods indicate that the group of the world top-income economies are participating in an ongoing convergence process, though the financial crisis might have disturbed it. The convergence evidence tends to grow weaker when the assumption of the deterministic underlying trend is enriched with a stochastic trend and finally abandoned.

Keywords: Economic growth; Economic convergence; Developed countries (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C32 C33 O47 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1062976918301662
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:quaeco:v:80:y:2021:i:c:p:841-853

DOI: 10.1016/j.qref.2019.03.001

Access Statistics for this article

The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance is currently edited by R. J. Arnould and J. E. Finnerty

More articles in The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().