REGIONAL (DI)CONVERGENCE

Do regions converge? This essay provides an overview of the key developments in the study of regional convergence, discussing the methodological issues that have arisen since the first attempts to analyse convergence and critically surveying the results that have been obtained for different regional systems. Two underlying arguments will guide the attempt to reach an answer: (i) not all empirical approaches to the analysis of convergence appear equally reliable and not all results equally convincing; (ii) although most regional convergence studies make use of empirical methods originally developed to analyse cross-country convergence, regions and countries are far from interchangeable concepts. The picture that emerges from this particular perspective is one in which convergence is often confined to groups of geographically contiguous regions.