This paper investigates the role played by public capital in increasing the productivity levels in Italy. For the construction of the regional series for the public capital over the period 1996-2002, the study benefits from the use of the rich dataset on public expenditure, recently published by...

The picture on disparities in productivity growth and in unemployment across European regions reveals the existence of a slow and not very systematic convergence of labor productivity toward a common level, and of an even more uncertain convergence of unemployment rates. This paper uses a...

In this paper we study two closely related issues. First, the role of technology heterogeneity and diffusion in the convergence of GDP per worker observed across the European regions, in the absence of data on regional TFP. Second, the spatial pattern of the observed regional heterogeneity in...

Our aim is to address the problem of measuring how much of the convergence observed across European regions is due to convergence in technology versus convergence in capital-labour ratios. To this aim, we first develop a growth model where technology accumulation in lagging regions depends on...

Regional differentials in per capita income and labour productivity in Italy is one of the most notable cases of regional inequality and have attracted attention from economists from all over the world since the 1950s. In this paper we first aim at yielding a comprehensive description of the...

The recent theoretical and empirical works on economic growth based on Solow’s model have generally neglected the role played by the sectoral mix and structural change on aggregate growth. However, as many development economists have remarked, sectors are characterized by enormous differences...

In this article I maintain that until the mid Seventies the regions of the Italian Mezzogiorno have followed a well-known path of divergence and convergence – a pattern in common with many other similar cases. The main characteristic of the Mezzogiorno’s case, however, is that the...

This paper proposes a fixed-effect panel methodology that enables us to simultaneously take into account both TFP convergence and the traditional neoclassical-type of convergence. We analyse a sample of Italian regions between 1963 and 1993 and find strong evidence that both mechanisms were at...

We analyze the empirical relationship between growth, country size and tourism specialization by using a dataset covering the period 1980-2003. We find that tourism countries grow significantly faster than all the other sub-groups considered in our analysis. Tourism appears to be an independent...

This paper adopts a fixed-effect panel methodology that enables us to take into account both TFP and neoclassical convergence. We use a sample of 76 countries, 1960-2003 and estimate TFP values obtained by using different estimators such as LSDV, Kiviet-corrected LSDV, and GMM à la Arellano and...