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Testing the Convergence Hypothesis

Frank R. Lichtenberg

The Review of Economics and Statistics 1994

The authors show that, contrary to the beliefs of some previous analysts of international economic growth, the hypotheses of convergence and of mean-reversion are not equivalent. Under some assumptions, the rate of convergence is independent of the degree of mean-reversion; under other assumptions, mean-reversion is a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for convergence. The authors show the relationship between the convergence test and the mean-reversion test and provide an empirical example in which the null hypothesis of no mean-reversion is rejected but the null hypothesis of no convergence is not rejected. Copyright 1994 by MIT Press.

DOI
10.2307/2109982
Volume
76 (3)
Pages
576
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