The countries of Eastern Europe achieved two remarkable transitions in the short period of the last two decades: from plan to market and, then, in the run-up to and entry into the European Union, they rode a wave of global trade and financial market integration. Focusing on the second...

The economic convergence consists in the very close, even identical evolutions of one variable in two different countries or regions. Within the European model, the macroeconomic and cohesion policies insure a good substantiation of the sustained economic

The staff report for the 2008 Article IV Consultation of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia discusses economic developments and policies. The new government’s economic program aims to raise growth further, but does not address these vulnerabilities. Plans to increase the central...

This paper presents the issue of economic convergence, reviewing some of the theories used in analyzing this process, theories of economic growth, types of economic convergence: nominal, real and institutional convergence, the effects of the recent crisis on economic convergence. The programme...

We show that in a fully integrated economy, in which there is free mobility of goods and factors, each member’s share of total output will equal its shares of total stocks of productive factors (i.e., physical and human capital). We label this result the equal-share relationship. This...

Economic stagnation in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) has led several economists to question the region’s ability to attain sustained economic growth, some of them arguing for the need to shift away from natural resource - based exports. Yet, we find that low growth has not been common to all...

This paper presents the analysis of sigma (σ) and beta (β) convergences of per capita GDP among the 10 European countries which accessed the European Union in 2004. Our results confirm the existence of both types of convergence in the second half of the 1990s and the 2000s. Generally, the...

This paper incorporates economic vulnerability, defined as the increased proneness of certain economies to downside risks, within a neo-classical economic growth model to seek an explanation to the observation that a number of vulnerable economies enjoy high per capita output levels. Steady...

Within the European model, the macroeconomic and cohesion policies insure a good substantiation of the sustained economic growth. The achievement of the Single Market had positive effects upon the European economy as a whole, but these benefits have not been equally distributed among states,...