Regional convergence and aggregate business cycle in the United States

Abstract

Magrini S., Gerolimetto M. and Engin Duran H. Regional convergence and aggregate business cycle in the United States, Regional Studies. The existing literature on convergence largely ignores the effect of aggregate fluctuations on the evolution of income disparities. However, if regional disparities follow a distinct cyclical pattern in the short run, the period of analysis should be chosen with great care to avoid distortions in the results. By analysing convergence among forty-eight conterminous US states through the distribution dynamics approach, it is shown that these distortions could be quite sizeable. Moreover, when convergence is analysed over an appropriate period that includes only complete cycles (1989–2007), results show that regional disparities exhibit a pro-cyclical behaviour and that the underlying long-run tendency is towards divergence. © 2013, © 2013 Regional Studies Association.