| dc.description.abstract | The work discussed in Bivand and Brunstad (2003) was an attempt to
throw light on apparent variability in regional convergence in relation to agriculture
as a sector subject to powerful political measures, in Western Europe,
1989–1999. The present study takes up a number of points made in conclusion
in that paper. Since it is possible that the non-stationarity found there is
related to further missing variables, including the inadequacy of the way in
which agricultural subsidies are represented, we attempt to replace the agriculture
variables with better estimates of producer subsidy equivalents. It is
also sensible to check that agricultural support is not masking or masked by
other variables, for example human capital. The paper is also an account of
the development of software contributed to the
R
project (R
Development Core
Team, 2005) as packages, in particular the spdep package for spatial econometrics.
New functions generously contributed by researchers will be presented
and compared. We find that agricultural support does impact regional
economic growth after human capital is taken into consideration, and that we
can show that apparent non-stationarity is alleviated by adding these variables.
We further find that the moderated remaining spatial autocorrelation can best be represented by a substantive spatial lag model. | en |
