Abhatoo - Centre Nationale de Documentation

We analyze convergence among the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries toward their average on one hand and toward the US economy on the other hand. Using stochastic and beta convergence we find some evidence for GCC economies convergence toward their average, and weak evidence for convergence toward the US economy. The assumption of a structural break in the data does not greatly alter the initial results. Further, we analyze the speed of convergence for the convergent economies. Our analysis projects that for convergent economies, they tend to converge to their average at a higher speed than expected by theoretical models or found for other countries.