Pan-European Regional Income Growth and Club-Convergence - Insights from a Spatial Econometric Perspective

Manfred Fischer and Claudia Stirböck ()
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Claudia Stirboeck ()

ERSA conference papers from European Regional Science Association

Abstract: Club-convergence analysis provides a more realistic and detailed picture about regional income growth than traditional convergence analysis. This paper presents a spatial econometric framework for club-convergence testing that relates the concept of club-convergence to the notion of spatial heterogeneity. The study provides evidence for the club-convergence hypothesis in cross-regional growth dynamics from a pan-European perspective. The conclusions are threefold. First, we reject the standard Barro-style regression model which underlies most empirical work on regional income convergence, in favour of a two regime [club] alternative in which different regional economies obey different linear regressions when grouped by means of Getis and Ord's (1992) local clustering technique. Second, the results point to a heterogeneous pattern in the pan-European convergence process. Heterogeneity appears in both the convergence rate and the steady-state level. But, third, the study also reveals that spatial error dependence introduces an important bias in our perception of the club-convergence and shows that neglection of this bias would give rise to misleading conclusions.

Date: 2005-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eec and nep-geo
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www-sre.wu.ac.at/ersa/ersaconfs/ersa05/papers/6.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:wiw:wiwrsa:ersa05p6

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ERSA conference papers from European Regional Science Association Welthandelsplatz 1, 1020 Vienna, Austria.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Gunther Maier ().