Convergence, Big Time

In his influential 1997 paper, Divergence, Big Time, Lant Pritchett estimated:

…that from 1870 to 1990 the ratio of per capita incomes between the richest and the poorest countries increased by roughly a factor of five and that the difference in income between the richest country and all others has increased by an order of magnitude.

Pritchett was correct but Patel, Sandeful and Subramanian show that just where Pritchett’s study ended, convergence began!

While unconditional convergence was singularly absent in the past, there has been unconditional convergence, beginning (weakly) around 1990 and emphatically for the last two decades.

https://www.cgdev.org/sites/default/files/patel-sandefur-subramanian-beta_by_series.png

The figure above plots the coefficient (“beta”) from the plain vanilla unconditional convergence regression (relating average growth of real per capita GDP over the long run to its initial level). A statistically significant negative beta denotes convergence and divergence otherwise. Since we know from Johnson et al. (2013) that growth rates vary widely across datasets, we plot the annual betas for three such sets: the Penn World Tables (PWT), the World Development Indicators, and the Maddison Project (Bolt et al. 2014).[1] While the point estimates vary across datasets, the consistent pattern across them all is a statistically significant negative beta since around 1995 (unconditional convergence) and its lack prior to that (see also Roy, Kessler and Subramanian, 2016).

Our basic point doesn’t require regressions. Looking at the 43 countries the World Bank classified as “low income” in 1990, 65 percent have grown faster than the high-income average since 1990. The same is true for 82 percent of the 62 middle-income countries circa 1990.

Neo-liberalism has been incredibly successful, essentially delivering on all of its promises of economic growth, declines in poverty, and peace. Yet, the ideas behind what Andrei Shleifer called The Age of Milton Friedman are now under attack and in retreat.

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