ABSTRACT

In this chapter, the author provides a brief review of the predictions made by the most popular models on comparative growth and the evolution of disparities in income per capita between economies. Regions within a country, or in a set of integrated economies, such as the European Union, are supposed to be more homogeneous than a set of worldwide economies. The focus of intra-distribution dynamics analysis is to reveal how economies transit from any point in the distribution to any other point, which, at its simplest, involves estimating the probability of a poor economy staying poor or becoming rich. In connection with predictions drawn from the theoretical models of growth, empirical settings have been developed to test the convergence hypothesis. The process of convergence has probably been more intense in labor productivity than in terms of product per inhabitant.