Regional Convergence in the European Union, new Member States and Croatia

Mikulić Davor (), Lovrinčević Željko () and Nagyszombaty Andrea Galić ()
Additional contact information
Mikulić Davor: Institute of Economics, Zagreb Senior research fellow Institute of Economics, Zagreb
Lovrinčević Željko: Senior research fellow Institute of Economics, Zagreb
Nagyszombaty Andrea Galić: Head of Department Central Bureau of Statistics of the Republic of Croatia

South East European Journal of Economics and Business, 2013, vol. 8, issue 1, 9-21

Abstract: Over the past two decades, the issue of regional convergence in the European Union has been the subject of a wide range of empirical research. This paper aims to provide more information on the differences in regional growth patterns of new member states (NMS), as well as Croatia, in addition to the factors influencing regional disparities within each country. This research provides an analysis of regional convergence in the period 2001-2008 at the NUTS II and NUTS III level.The most widely used model for testing convergence hypotheses is beta-convergence analysis. Other factors commonly included in the econometric modelling of convergence are demographic variables, labour market conditions, industrial structure, institutional factors and overall government policy. The main hypothesis is that the process of regional convergence in NMS and Croatia is not strong enough to dominate over other factors, influencing regional potential growth (mainly industry structure and quality of human capital). Absolute β-convergence can be found at the national level for EU countries. Convergence also can be found for NMS regions, but the pace of convergence on the regional level is lower in comparison to the national level and the estimated β-convergence parameter is less significant.

Keywords: regional convergence; regional policy; economic growth; Croatia (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.2478/jeb-2013-0001 (text/html)

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:vrs:seejeb:v:8:y:2013:i:1:p:13:n:1

DOI: 10.2478/jeb-2013-0001

Access Statistics for this article

South East European Journal of Economics and Business is currently edited by Adnan Efendic, Vesna Babić-Hodović and Aziz Šunje

More articles in South East European Journal of Economics and Business from Sciendo
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peter Golla ().