Despite years of deepening economic integration among the states and regions of the European Union, empirical research remains inconclusive about speed of convergence across regions, if not its existence. This thesis provides novel evidence on convergence in the EU while focusing on development at regional level after the Great Recession. It uses recently developed log t convergence test by Phillips and Sul (2007). Our findings speak against the convergence in level of income per capita among the European regions and give us five clubs of regions converging in their income growth rates instead. Investigating further the geographical distribution of the convergence clubs, we confirm high inequality within the member states and find large continuous area of high convergence clubs in the urbanized part of Western Europe. Furthermore, we investigated the determinants of convergence club membership using Logistic Regression. The main explanatory variable of interest were Business Services (BS), a dynamic sector of the economy with presumably strong positive effect on regional innovative potential. We found positive effect of BS on membership in higher convergence clubs. Yet, this effect seems to diminish for the very highest club.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:nusl.cz/oai:invenio.nusl.cz:372959 |
| Date | January 2018 |
| Creators | Pintera, Jan |
| Contributors | Baxa, Jaromír, Kopečná, Vědunka |
| Source Sets | Czech ETDs |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | info:eu-repo/semantics/masterThesis |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/restrictedAccess |
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