Long-run Economic Growth & Convergence

Extract the data for GDP per capita of all sovereign countries for selected years of 1960, 1990 and 2015 from global databases (like the IMF or World Bank) and perform a convergence data analysis based on the following questions.

use the programing language Gretl, accessible for free download at http://gretl.sourceforge.net

Discuss Long-Run Economic Growth

Will the poor countries catch up rich countries by growing faster?

Identify between conditional and unconditional convergence

Provide a summary statistics table for all countries

Select 10 sample countries from the data (5 poor and 5 rich) and explain what important key historic or economic factors have happened during the years under consideration and how is this reflected in their per capita GDP? Make an economic analysis of the characteristics of these countries under consideration.

Explain the structure of the data provided and how it characterizes the countries under

consideration over the years that are taken into account. Explain why you

believe that the poor countries in the data can (cannot) catch up with the rich countries?

Substantiation points should be based on the convergence analysis you made from the data.