Income Convergence within MENA countries: a panel unit root approach

Imène Guetat ()
Additional contact information
Imène Guetat: Faculté de Droit et des Sciences Economiques et Politiques, FDSEP

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: This article aims at testing the convergence hypothesis in MENA region using new tests of a unit root in panel data. Evans and Karras [Evans P., & Karras G. (1996). Convergence revisited. Journal of Monetary Economics, 37, 249–265] and Bernard and Jones [Bernard A., & Jones C. I. (1996). Productivity across industries and countries: Time series theory and evidence. The Review of Economics and Statistics, 135–146] recommend this technique to evaluate the income convergence hypothesis. According to them it avoids econometric problems of the cross-countries growth regressions testing convergence and sample bias of the multivariate cointegration techniques. We test for both absolute and the conditional convergence with panel unit root tests using the Summers and Heston's data 5.6 and 6.1 on the periods of 1960 to 1990 and from 1960 to 2000. The absolute convergence hypothesis use panel unit roots test with no fixed individual effects. The catching-up hypothesis is not rejected for most groups of countries of the region during both periods. If we allow a break in the unit root tests, the hypothesis is not rejected for more groups. The conditional convergence requires panel unit root tests with fixed individual effects. Again, during the whole periods, the conditional convergence is not rejected for the major part of the remaining groups of MENA countries.

Keywords: Conditional convergence; Catching-up; Regional integration; Panel unit root tests; Middle East and North Africa (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Published in Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, 2007, 46, pp.685-706

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

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:hal:journl:hal-04098072

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().