The authors revisit Western Europe's record with labor productivity convergence and tentatively extrapolate its implications for the future path of Eastern Europe. The poorer Western European countries caught up with the richer ones through both higher rates of physical capital accumulation and...

"This paper estimates, using data from the United States and Euro Area, a two-country stochastic growth model in which both neutral and investment-specific technology shocks are nonstationary but cointegrated across economies. The results point to large and persistent swings in productivity,...

We revisit Western Europe's record with labor-productivity convergence, and tentatively extrapolate its implications for the future path of Eastern Europe. The poorer Western European countries caught up with the richer ones through both higher rates of physical capital accumulation and greater...