Kelantan has been the poorest state in Malaysia for the past five decades. Despite the various Malaysian Development Plans for the past several decades, regional disparity between states remains in Malaysia. Thus, the objective of the present paper is to address the question whether Kelantan has...

The purpose of the present paper is to examine income convergence in Malaysia by using the nonlinear unit root test due to Kapetanios et al. (KSS, 2003) and extended by Chong et al. (CHLL, 2008) to permit the test of long-run convergence and catching-up hypotheses. We apply the KSS-CHLL...

We use US county level data (3,058 observations) from 1970 to 1998 to explore the relationship between economic growth and the extent of government employment at three levels: federal, state and local. We find that increases in federal, state and local government employments are all negatively...

In the last four decades the financial services sector has becoming more important for the Malaysian economy. Despite gaining importance for enhancing economic growth, the contribution of the finance sector to the total services real GDP has been ranked second in Peninsular Malaysia, third in...

Disparity in income across states and regions in Malaysia continues to be a matter of concern. The purpose of the present study is to investigate empirically the question of whether the economic development of the state of Sabah has an impact on her neighbouring countries or vice versa, the...

Higgins et al. (2006) report several statistically significant partial correlates with U.S. per capita income growth. However, Levine and Renelt (1992) demonstrate that such correlations are hardly ever robust to changing the combination of conditioning variables included. We ask whether the...

We use Mississippi county-level data on (per capita) income and the percentages of populations that are Black (henceforth "Black") to examine the relationship between race and economic growth. The analysis is also conditioned on 40 other economic and socio-demographic variables. Given a negative...

In this paper we outline (i) why sigma-convergence may not accompany beta-convergence, (ii) discuss evidence of beta-convergence in the U.S., and (iii) use U.S. county-level data containing over 3,000 cross-sectional observations to demonstrate that sigma-convergence cannot be detected at the...

This study examines the violent crime convergence among the fifty one states in the United States. The chosen method for this analysis is nonlinear unit root test due to Kapetanios et al. (KSS, 2003), which was later extended by Chong et al. (CHLL, 2008). KSS-CHLL nonlinear unit root was applied...