An Alternative View of the Convergence Issue of Growth Empirics.

ABSTRACT In this paper, we study the dynamics of economic growth for 140 countries during the period 1951-2003. The variables representing economic performance are levels and growth rates of per capita gross domestic product. Using the concept of economic regime, we introduce a notion of distance between the dynamical paths of different countries. Then, a minimal spanning tree and a hierarchical tree are constructed from time series to help detect the existence of groups of countries sharing similar economic performance. The two main clusters that are identified over the whole-time interval can be interpreted as two groups of countries with high and low performance, respectively. The evolution of such clusters shows three main stylised facts: Certain countries move across clusters; the high-performance cluster tends to span, while the low-performance one tends to be (more) compact; and the distance between the two groups increases in time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]