Specializing in tourism is an option available to a number of less developed countries and regions. But is it a good option? To answer this question, we have compared the relative growth performance of 14 “tourism countries” within a sample of 143 countries, observed during the period...

International tourism is today one of the most important tradable sectors, with expenditure on tourist goods and services representing some 8% of total world export receipts and 5% of world GDP. Cross-country data for 1985-95 on tourism specialisation and economic growth reveal the following...

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...

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...

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...

This chapter is divided into two parts. In the first part we review the main results of a typical New Economic Geography and Growth (NEGG) model (Baldwin and Martin, 2003) and assess the contribution of this literature to the issue of long-run income gaps between countries. In the second part we...

Relazione per la Sessione plenaria su “Crescita regionale e urbana nel mercato globale” XXI Conferenza Annuale AISRe - Palermo 20-22 settembre 2000