This paper revisits the issue of income convergence by examining the question of whether poorer Census Block Groups have been catching up with wealthier Census Block Groups over the 1980-2000 period. The dataset consists of 161 Census Block Groups in Alabama’s west-central Black Belt region. Estimates of a spatial lag model provide support for the conditional convergence hypothesis and explain ...

This paper has two parts. The first part examines the regional health expenditure inequality in China by testing two hypotheses on health expenditure convergence. Cross-section regressions and cluster analysis are used to study the health expenditure convergence and to identify convergence clusters. We find no single nationwide convergence, only convergence by cluster. In the second part of the...

This paper investigates the evidence for convergence in per capita incomes across 115 economies during the period 1950–1998 and examines the impact that international trade had on this process. Drawing on trade-conditioning within a distribution dynamics framework, that explicitly models frequency distributions of the cross sections of economies over time, this study suggests that trade pattern...