Economic and social convergence in Colombia

Vicente Royuela and Gustavo García Cruz ()

No 201014, IREA Working Papers from University of Barcelona, Research Institute of Applied Economics

Abstract: GDP has usually been used as a proxy for human well-being. Nevertheless, other social aspects should also be considered, such as life expectancy, infant mortality, educational enrolment and crime issues. With this paper we investigate not only economic convergence but also social convergence between regions in a developing country, Colombia, in the period 1975-2005. We consider several techniques in our analysis: sigma convergence, stochastic kernel estimations, and also several empirical models to find out the beta convergence parameter (cross section and panel estimates, with and without spatial dependence). The main results confirm that we can talk about convergence in Colombia in key social variables, although not in the classic economic variable, GDP per capita. We have also found that spatial autocorrelation reinforces convergence processes through deepening market and social factors, while isolation condemns regions to nonconvergence.

Keywords: Price asymmetry; meta-regression analysis; gasoline prices. JEL classification:L11; Q4; C25. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 70 pages
Date: 2010-09, Revised 2010-09
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (29)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.ub.edu/irea/working_papers/2010/201014.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Economic and Social Convergence in Colombia (2015)
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:ira:wpaper:201014

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IREA Working Papers from University of Barcelona, Research Institute of Applied Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Alicia García ().