Growth Empirics: A Panel Data Approach—A Comment

Abstract

This paper comments on recent developments in the literature on the econometric analysis of international growth and convergence. It notes that panel estimates of the neoclassical model, accommodating level effects for individual countries through heterogeneous intercepts, deal with some of the econometric difficulties arising in some of the earlier cross-sectional studies. But it notes that, in dynamic panels, heterogeneity in growth effects and in speeds of convergence renders this estimator inconsistent also. The pervasiveness of such heterogeneity is demonstrated in three samples of countries, and the effects of (incorrectly) imposing homogeneity on estimated parameters are illustrated and discussed.