The design of a stratified sample from a finite population deals with two main issues: the definition of a rule to partition the population, and the allocation of sampling units in the selected strata. This article examines a tree-based strategy which plans to solve jointly these issues when the...

The concept of convergence clubs is analyzed and compared with classical methods for the study of economic [beta]-convergence, which often consider the entire data set as one sample. A technique for the identification of convergence clubs is proposed. The algorithm is based on a modified version...