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The emerging European economies have been converging rapidly towards the more advanced European economies in recent years. However, large external imbalances in parts of the region have raised questions about sustainability and concerns about vulnerabilities. Empirical evidence in this paper suggest that the convergence trend of emerging Europe is based on strong fundamentals and is expected to continue, but at a slower pace. Moreover, the convergence path may be volatile as countries with large external imbalances adjust, with risks of a hard landing in some cases

The goal of the present article is to investigate the degree of convergence in public expenditures for a panel of 17 European Union member countries spanning the period 1990 to 2012. We apply the methodology of Phillips and Sul (2007 Phillips, P. C. B. and Sul, D. (2007) to various categories of public expenditures to assess the existence of convergence clubs. Overall, the results do not support the hypothesis that all countries converge to a single equilibrium state in various public expenditures. ; N/A

Journalism is under ever-increasing pressure, due in large part to the phenomenon of media convergence. Not only does media convergence redefine the tasks of journalists and newsrooms, it also re-shapes the business environments of media companies. In this book, international media practitioners and researchers describe and analyze the relationships between media convergence and advertising, public relations, social media and other areas of communication posing a challenge to journalism.

This paper provides a comprehensive review of the factors that can cause price levels to diverge and which are at the root of different inflation rates in Europe including the EU-27. Among others, we study the structural and cyclical factors influencing market and non-market-based service, house and goods prices, and we summarise some stylised facts emerging from descriptive statistics. Subsequently, we set out the possible mismatches between price level convergence and inflation rates. Having described in detail the underlying economic factors, we proceed to demonstrate the relative importance of these factors on observed inflation rates first in an accounting framework and then by relying on panel estimations. Our estimation results provide the obituary notice for the Balassa-Samuelson effect. Nevertheless, we show that other factors related to economic convergence may push up inflation rates in transition economies. Cyclical effects and regulated prices are found to be important drivers of inflation rates in an enlarged Europe. House prices matter to some extent in the euro area, whereas the exchange rate plays a prominent (but declining) role in transition economies.

This paper uses OLS and GMM estimations to test for convergence in income distribution. Convergence tests are performed using a high-quality U.S. cross-state panel. The results strongly support the hypothesis of convergence in income distribution across American states.

We explore the natural rate of interest, shortly r*, in emerging economies. If economic growth originates from convergence, then growth, say, from technological progress will be lower than we find in the data and, hence, r* will be lower. Ignoring convergence upwardly biases our estimates of r*. We extend the New Keynesian small open economy model to take account of convergence. The model is estimated with Bayesian techniques for four emerging economies in Central and Eastern Europe: Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary and Romania. The estimation process is informed by empirical evidence about a rapid catch-up of our example economies during the period from 2003 to 2019. We confirm the decline in r* over the last decades. When we account for capital deepening, we find meaningful differences with non-negligible implications for monetary policy.

Convergence among regions is explicitly defined as a political aim of the European Union. Overall, NUTS3 regions have indeed shown a path of convergence since the year 2000, but there are huge differences among the regions. Many Eastern European countries as well as several regions in Spain and Portugal are characterised by a convergence process. However, the opposite holds for many regions in Greece, Italy and the UK. The size of a region's manufacturing is important for the process of convergence, and the direction of subsidies from the EU to the right fields of activity also has a positive influence on the probability of a region to converge.

European regions experience accelerating ageing, but the process has substantial regional variation. This paper examines the effect of this variation on regional economic cohesion in Europe. We measure the effect of convergence or divergence in the share of the working age population on convergence or divergence in economies of NUTS 2 regions. The effect of convergence or divergence in ageing on economic convergence or divergence is quite substantial and, in some cases, is bigger than the effect of changes in productivity and labour force participation. Convergence of ageing leads to economic convergence only when the share of the working age population in rich regions exceeds that in poor regions and the former regions experience a substantial decline in the share of the working age population, or the latter regions experience an increase. During 2003–12, an inverse relationship between convergence in ageing and economic convergence was the rule rather than the exception.

The diverse set of papers in this ebook was selected from the second Communication Policy Research Africa (CPRafrica) conference organised by Research ICT Africa in association with the University of Nairobi in April 2011. The conference is part of a wider programme to develop African research excellence in the area of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) policy and regulation. With the theme Connectivity & Convergence the selected papers cover a wide range of subjects from the examination of infrastructure investment patterns and their relationship to policy and regulatory constrain