β-Convergence between Iran and Selected Islamic Countries

This paper examines the existence of β-Convergence between per-capita incomes of selected Islamic countries. For this purpose, data over the period 1965-2006 and a time series approach proposed by Vogelsang (1998) are applied. Robustness of the estimated parameters to the presence of unit roots and/or serial correlations in the residuals is the main advantage of this method. The results show that per-capita income of most countries is converging to the average per-capita income of the selected Islamic countries, which provide evidence of β-Convergence. Cameroon, Indonesia, Malaysia, Niger, Chad, and Togo are the countries that have shown some forms of divergence either before the break date or after that. The estimated break dates are clustered and mostly related to the energy shocks in 1974, 1979, and 1986.