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A major lesson of the European Monetary Union (EMU) crisis is that serious disequilibria result from regional monetary arrangements not designed to be robust to a variety of shocks. The purpose of this paper is to assess these disequilibria within the Economic and Monetary Community of Central Africa (CEMAC), West African Economic and Monetary Union (UEMOA) and Financial Community of Africa (CFA) zones.

In the assessments, monetary policy targets inflation and financial dynamics of depth, efficiency, activity and size while real sector policy targets economic performance in terms of GDP growth. The author also provides the speed of convergence and time required to achieve a 100 percent convergence.

But for financial intermediary size within the CFA zone, findings, for the most part, support only unconditional convergence. There is no form of convergence within the CEMAC zone.

The broad insignificance of conditional convergence results has substantial policy implications. Monetary and real policies, which are often homogenous for member states, are thwarted by heterogeneous structural and institutional characteristics, which give rise to different levels and patterns of financial intermediary development. Therefore, member states should work towards harmonizing cross‐country differences in structural and institutional characteristics that hamper the effectiveness of monetary policies.

The paper provides warning signs to the CFA zone in the heat of the Euro zone crises.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the competitiveness and convergence of the G7 and big emerging markets (BEM) nations using various economic, demographic, trade, investment, and freedom and governance criteria.

The two groups of nations, G7 and BEM, are compared on the basis of various longitudinal and cross‐sectional variables. The longitudinal variables are GDP and real GDP growth, per capita GDP, international trade, foreign direct investment, index of ageing, and life expectancy at birth. Cross‐sectional competitive indices are Global competitiveness index, index of economic freedom, Democracy index, Human development index, Gini index, Government effectiveness, and Corruption perception index.

The findings show that BEM is growing faster than G7 in most economic indicators including GDP, trade, and investment. The growth results in some form of convergence. The freedom and governance infrastructure of the BEM is relatively weak to support their economic growth. The primary challenge of the BEM is coming from the economic interdependence they create in a globalized economy. Overall, the growth presents a new political reality that the world must recognize.

National competitiveness is a long‐term issue. A 30‐year longitudinal analysis may not be long enough to accurately reflect a nation's performance. Evidently, wealth creation in the emerging markets has profound influence in noneconomic areas. Political polarization and military confrontation are not unlikely.

Governments and businesses in G7, BEM, or the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) nations and institutions involved in global governance (e.g. World Bank, IMF, and WEF) may use the findings of the study to determine their policies. We should pay special attention to the global economic interdependence and guard against the negative effects of emerging markets' growth.

The comparative analysis between the G7 and BEM in terms of competitiveness and convergence is an original contribution. Also, the author's insight beyond economics is a unique section to follow. The author is not aware of any other study that has used the two concepts competitiveness and convergence together to understand the emerging markets.

This paper aims to provide empirical evidence on technology convergence within economies of the European Union which is usable for determining the economic growth policy aimed at sustainable long‐run economic growth and the convergence of the development between EU‐member states.

Two different empirical procedures are applied by estimating the technology convergence within the European Union on Eurostat data set. The first is framework developed by Dowrick and Nguyen. The second one is the authors' original contribution to the methodology which is based on the frontier production functions.

Significant technology convergence is recognized between 15 old EU‐member states and eight new‐member states. However, the technology convergence has obviously not accelerated the convergence of gross domestic product per labor unit between exposed groups of economies. Technical inefficiency is recognized as the main source that impedes a spill‐over effect of technology convergence. Following this it is established that in the future more effort should be directed into elimination of technical inefficiency.

Presented findings can be used to arrange the economic policy measures aimed at accelerating technology development in case of European Union.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the food price inflation convergence across countries and regions. This study aims to identify the key drivers for food price inflation across countries and regions.

We test whether the international food price inflations are converging over time using the log t convergence test and clustering analysis. These inflation data are collected from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

The test results suggest that there is little evidence of overall convergence. Then we utilize a clustering algorithm and the results support that there is strong evidence of multiple convergence clubs. In addition, we examine the transition path of the various convergence and find that social stability regulation together with economic conditions are important determinants of convergence club membership.

First off, local conflict and economic environment result in food supply and prices, but this study is limited to the dynamics of prices.

Food prices inflations are not converging to single common price inflation, but there exist subgroups of countries or regions within which food price inflation tends to converge. These groupings tend to be related to the economic development and social stability of countries and regions.

The authors believe that any analysis of food price inflations that does not consider the political environment and economic conditions dynamics will likely be omitting important components of food price dynamics.

This study uses a unique data set covering 198 countries and regions and provides a comprehensive analysis of international food price inflation convergence identifying the key drivers of convergence club membership.

The research analyzes the convergence of several socioeconomic indicators in a sample of 137 countries over the period 1990–2019. Applying log t-convergence tests, it finds that socioeconomic indicators’ convergence is divergent. Measuring seven different indicators, there are only two indicators of life expectancy and access to the internet converging at the global level, while the remaining indicators of gross domestic product per capita (GDPP), foreign direct investment (FDI) inflow, urbanization, fertility, and CO₂ emissions do not. An extension to sub-sample analysis by levels of income and clustering convergence clubs is employed to confirm the heterogeneity and complexity of development pathways among countries. There are several insights for researchers and governments regarding future research and policies, especially for the development of developing countries.

Social change and modernization theories postulate that as countries grow they gradually move toward a condition of similarity in various spheres exhibiting similar economic and social traits. The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether a process of convergence in terms of criminality levels is present in the case of European countries.

The research question at hand is tackled through conventional s and ß-convergence methodologies and a battery of unit root tests in the case of 16 European countries over the period 1972-2012.

The findings reported, herein, are quite uniform irrespective of the empirical methodology employed to investigate the issue at hand. The result points to a process of convergence in terms of crime rates. However, this convergence process, although present and statistically traceable, is a rather gradual one as this is depicted both by the value of the β-coefficient as well as by the trend of the coefficient of variation.

Most of the studies in this strand of the literature focus on investigating the association between economic conditions such as unemployment and crime or on the effectiveness of crime thwarting policies. To the best of the knowledge, this is the first paper that addresses the issue of convergence in terms of crime rates in the case of European countries.

This paper aims to examine the impact of corruption and bureaucracy on economic growth in Greece as measured by the growth rate of per capita GDP. Also, using the mean per capita GDP of the EU as a benchmark, it seeks to investigate the convergence timing of Greece with the EU.

The empirical approach taken is based on beta convergence theory.

The results confirm the negative impact of bureaucracy and corruption on economic growth. However, the corruption exerts a more significant influence on growth than bureaucracy. Also, the timing of convergence of Greece with the EU is found to be 37 years.

The robustness of these results is based on the use of a relatively new econometric method which is the Markov conditional bootstrap.

To analyse the European Union (EU) economies in the economic‐cultural context using a combination of soft variables and hard economic indicators in different time periods.

The theoretical frame was used as a foundation for the empirical analysis. The process of cultural convergence was empirically based on 16 cultural variables of 22 European countries, longitudinal data was used. The process of economic‐cultural convergence was based on five economic‐cultural variables of 22 European countries, longitudinal data was used.

The cultural diversity on its own is not a obstacle for the introduction and enforcement of modern social structures in Europe. The level of homogenisation of the cultural value orientations is in the year 1999 higher than in the year 1990. Culture is more oriented toward global care, reflecting more holism and interdependence.

The research explores new empirical views on convergence process in the context of the EU integration processes.

The research is of great importance to policy makers and decision takers on a national and supranational level.

The research proposes a different methodological perspective on convergence processes in the EU.

With the growth of income at the global level, the World Bank data show that there are rising levels of income disparity across countries, groups, regions and within the countries. This fact otherwise hints at the inter-country divergence in incomes, particularly between the developed and developing countries of the world. This chapter, therefore, attempts to examine the convergence or divergence in credit, GDP and HDI across the 10 selected countries for the period of 1990–2019 applying the neoclassical growth approach and the time series approach. The results of the exercise in line with the neoclassical theories on absolute convergence and sigma convergence show that the countries are unquestionably converging in GDP and HDI with mixed results in case of credit. The results of convergence in GDP and HDI in all the countries and their developed and developing counterparts provide a possible explanation as to why the cross countries’ income inequalities as well as world inequality in income and development are reducing over time. On the other hand, the results of the time series approach display that credit and HDI are converging in both absolute and conditional terms but the countries are converging in conditional terms only for GDP. Thus, the claims of the World Bank are not valid for the selected countries in the chapter, rather, they can be verified by taking other countries and groups into consideration.

The main purpose of this paper is to examine the convergence hypothesis of House Price Index (HPI) in the case of 18 major Indian cities for the period 2014–2019.

To attain the authors main goal, this study applies a clustering algorithm advanced by Phillips and Sul. This test creates a club of convergence based on the growth of the cities in terms of HPI.

The study findings show the existence of two convergence clubs and one non-convergent group. Club 1 includes the cities with high HPI growth, whereas club 2 comprises of cities with least HPI growth. Cities belonging to the non-convergent group are neither converging nor diverging.

This study findings will benefit home buyers, sellers, investors, regulators and policymakers interested in the dynamic interlinkages of house price (HP) among Indian cities.

The majority of the studies are conducted in the case of China at the province or city levels. Furthermore, in the case of India, none of the studies has investigated the HP club convergence across Indian cities. Therefore, the present study fills this research gap by examining the HP club convergence across Indian cities.