Following León-Ledesma and Thirlwall (2002a), this paper investigates the extent to which the natural rate of growth of the Italian regions is endogenous, in the sense that it is affected by actual growth. The estimation framework is based on one version of the cyclical relationship between...

Taking as a starting point the evidence of growing disparities in the 1977-2003 years, the paper investigates the pure hysteresis hypothesis for regional unemployment rates in Italy. Relying both on univariate and panel unit-root rests, we can confidently reject the unit-root hypothesis. The...

Taking Italy as a case study, this paper investigates the link between economies' structural similarities and convergence. Specifically, treating technology as sector-specific and modelling technological spillovers as a positive function of the degree of similarity between economies' sectoral...