Economic integration in a multicone world?

This paper examines whether economic integration favors countries' convergence into a common cone of diversification. We analyze the manufacturing specialization patterns for a sample of 19 current and potential European Union countries over the period 1963-1998, and assess the impact of integration on their evolution. We perform year-by-year threshold estimations of Rybczynski relationships to identify the diversification cones and then estimate discrete choice models to investigate whether membership in the European Union is associated with a higher probability of being in a same cone. Economic integration in Europe is found to have promoted convergence from lower to higher diversification cones.