Economic growth in MENA countries: Is there convergence of per-capita GDPs?

In the last years a central issue in economic growth debate has been represented by the convergence problem. Many empirical economists have noticed that per-capita GDPs of poor regions tend to converge to those of the richer ones. This tendency is more evident in the nineties when the globalization phenomenon was born. In this paper we use a conditional β-convergence approach to evaluate the economic growth of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) countries. In particular, we use a set of state, environmental, and economic covariates as conditioning variables of the model. The MENA region is daily at the center of economic and political debate, and this stylized fact represents a further source of interest. Our data set is constituted by 26 countries, and ranges from 1950 to 2007.