What Does the Human Development Index Tell us about Convergence?

This study seeks to find out whether there existed an empirically discernable and robust tendency in the world for countries to converge in terms of human development over the last three decades. Human development is measured by the Human Development Index trend and convergence across countries is tested for by the conventional cross-country methods of beta- and sigma-convergence. We perform similar analyses on those countries that joined the European Union before its 2004 enlargement and on all current members of the EU too. Our results indicate convergence for all three groups of countries we consider, that is relatively backward countries managed to increase their HDI more than developed countries