Regional growth in Western Europe : an empirical exploration of interactions with agriculture and agricultural policy
Working paper
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Date
2002-01Metadata
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- Discussion papers (SAM) [663]
Abstract
Studies of convergence of regional growth in Western Europe have given varying
results, depending on the addition of conditioning variables and estimation methods,
as well as underlying models. This exploration adds agricultural variables to the basic
convergence model, which suggests that initially poorer regions grow faster than
initially more wealthy regions. Subsidising agriculture may be expected to impact
growth in different ways than initial gross value added per capita. We find some
support for our hypothesis that agricultural support has a negative impact on
convergence. The coefficients have the right sign and are significant or nearly
significant, but the results of both the basis model and our augmented model may be
subject to other mis-specification problems, possibly including non-stationarity, even after including the spatially lagged dependent variable. This is examined using
geographically weighted regression.
Publisher
Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration. Department of EconomicsSeries
Discussion paper2002:1