Solow (1956) has made an essential contribution to the Neo-classical growth approach through the economic convergence hypothesis. It assumes that poorer countries’ or regions’ per capita incomes tend to grow at faster rates than the richer ones. Convergence could occur either among a group...

Despite years of deepening economic integration among the states and regions of the European Union, empirical research remains inconclusive about speed of convergence across regions, if not its existence. This paper provides a new look on convergence in the EU while focusing on development at...

Due to problems with existing methodologies that aim to identify the causal impact of European Union cohesion policy on economic growth, we adopted a novel methodology. We first estimated 'unexplained economic growth' by controlling for the influence of various region-specific factors, and then...

The EU Cohesion Policy is one of the European Union's key policy instruments for reducing economic and social disparities among its regions. The paper evaluates the policy contribution to regional economic growth in V4 (Visegrad Four) countries. The study establishes a significant variation in...

The impact of structural funds of the European Union (EU) on regional economic growth is a matter of both political and economic importance. The large and regular payments made across the EU to countries and regions within them were and are meant to promote various aspects of growth and...

This paper tests directly a geography and growth model using regional data for Europe, the US, and Japan during different time periods. We set up a standard geography and growth model with a poverty trap and derive a log-linearized growth equation that corresponds directly to a threshold...

In this paper we use spatial dependence panel data models to analyse regional growth behaviour in Italy. Controlling for fixed-effects allows us to disentangle the effect of spatial dependence (or spatial interaction) from that of spatial heterogeneity and of omitted variables and, thus, to...

We investigate the convergence process among EU regions between 1980-2002 taking into account the effects of spatial heterogeneity and spatial spillover effects. The spatial regimes model allows for different steady-state growth paths. In contrast to previous analyses, the regimes in this paper...

We propose a semi-parametric spatial auto-covariance specification of the growth model to examine the growth behaviour of European regions in the period 1988-2000. This specification simultaneously takes account of the problems of non-linearities and spatial dependence. We obtain two main...

In this paper we outline (i) why sigma-convergence may not accompany beta-convergence, (ii) discuss evidence of beta-convergence in the U.S., and (iii) use U.S. county-level data containing over 3,000 cross-sectional observations to demonstrate that sigma-convergence has not occurred at the...