The paper surveys the main trends of per capita income convergence in the European Union. It stresses that income disparities have ceased to diminish across the European regions since 1980, although convergence between countries has continued in this period. Income levels have diverged inside...

This paper shows that actual systems of intergovernmental transfers are incompletely specified when viewed as mechanisms that operate over time, and that the norms of evolution most frequently used do not preserve the distributive properties they have at their initial position. We argue that...