A note on cross-country divergence in standard of living

Abstract

Convergence in ‘standards of living’ across countries is an important phenomenon that drew attraction of the researchers in economics during the last two decades. These studies take into account the growth of per capita gross domestic product or labour productivity as a measure of standard of living. The present study attempts to measure the standard of living in terms of the human development index which reflect the human well-being better than income or productivity and examines whether standards of living converge across economies over a fairly long period of time, such as 35 years (1960–1995). The convergence test has been attempted for the full sample as well as for three levels of human development. The study uses the convergence test introduced by Baumol. The tests indicate that in almost for all the cases divergence has been observed. Divergence is also observed for per capita real gross domestic product for all types of sample.