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Eco-efficiency refers to the ability to produce more goods and services with less impact on the environment and less consumption of natural resources. This issue has become a matter of concern that is receiving increasing attention from politicians, scientists and researchers. Furthermore, greenhouse gases emitted as a result of production processes have a marked impact on the environment and are also the foremost culprit of global warming and climate change. This paper assesses convergence in eco-efficiency in greenhouse gas emissions in the European Union. Eco-efficiency is assessed at both country and greenhouse-gas-specific levels using Data Envelopment Analysis techniques and directional distance functions, as recently proposed by Picazo-Tadeo et al. (Eur J Oper Res, 220:798–809, 2012). Convergence is then evaluated using the Phillips and Sul (Econometrica, 75:1771–1855, 2007) approach that allows testing for the existence of convergence groups. Although the results point to the existence of different convergence clubs depending on the specific pollutant considered, they signal the existence of at least four clear groups of countries. The first two groups are core European Union high-income countries (Benelux, Germany, Italy, Austria, the United Kingdom and Scandinavian countries). A third club is made up of peripheral countries (Spain, Ireland, Portugal and Greece) together with some Eastern countries (Latvia and Slovenia), while the remaining clubs consist of groups containing Eastern European countries.

This book is concerned with whether levels of labour productivity across the regions of an enlarged Europe converge or diverge. In particular, it is argued that the EU-27 regions follow a pattern of club convergence. In the early chapters the neoclassical model is extended by several elements from Endogenous Growth and New Economic Geography models, as a theoretical framework. It is argued that club or local convergence is attributed to differences in technology creation and adoption and agglomeration externalities across regions. This argument is developed in an explicitly spatial context, taking into account interaction and spillovers from technology creation across geographical areas. To support this argument, a theoretical model is developed, which attributes club convergence to existing differences with respect to the degree of technology adoption across regions. This model postulates that convergence amongst regions is feasible only if they share similar structural characteristics, regarding the creation and adoption of technology.

Global financial integration has been associated with divergent patterns of real convergence and the current account in emerging markets. While countries in emerging Asia have been running sizeable current account surpluses, countries in emerging Europe have been facing large current account deficits. In this paper we test for the relevance of financial market characteristics in explaining this divergence in the catching-up process in Europe and Asia. We assume that the two regions constitute distinct convergence clubs, with the euro area and the United States respectively at their cores. In line with the theoretical literature, we find that better developed and more integrated financial markets increase emerging markets´ ability to borrow abroad. Moreover, the degree of financial integration within the convergence clubs – as opposed to the state of financial integration in the global economy – and the extent of reserve accumulation are significant factors in explaining the divergent patterns of real convergence and the current account in the regions under review.

This chapter provides comments on Chapter 8 and 9 included in the part on “Financial integration and stability in an enlarged EU”. The comments on chapter 8 focus on the concept of “convergence clubs” as well as on the selection of variables and samples of countries included in the model used for explaining current account patterns in emerging Europe and emerging Asia. Regarding Chapter 9, comments touch upon the restrictive hypothesis on the impact of FDIs on the timing of the euro adoption in the new EU Member States, the concept of “integration gains” and some policy conclusions in the last section of the chapter.

In international cross-country studies, evidence for club convergence has often been found using different methodologies (Baumol 1986; Durlauf and Johnson 1995; Quah 1996a, 1997). In the case of the European regions, Ertur and Le Gallo (see Chap. 2) and Le Gallo et al. (see Chap. 3) have shown that the convergence rate among European regions is slow and that GDP disparities seem to be persistent despite the European economic integration process and higher growth rates of some poorer regions, as highlighted as well in the European Commission reports (1996, 1999). Moreover, over the 1980–1995 period, Ertur and Le Gallo (see Chap. 2) found that the geographical distribution of European regions exhibits a persistent polarization pattern between rich regions in the north and poor regions in the south.

On the one hand, it has been well established over the last decade that the worldwide income distribution has been polarizing or stratifying into distinct classes of income since World War II (see, among others, Bianchi (1997), Desdoigts (1994), and Quah (1996)). The analysis of the world income distribution is motivated by the following key question: can we find in the data evidences of poverty traps? Such a question can be found for instance in Baumol (1986)’s idea of convergence clubs.