Does convergence matter if it takes 100 years? Different scenarios of convergence

Downscaling global income scenarios assuming institutional convergence or divergence

“…However, clear evidence of stagnant economies coinciding with rapidly growing economies shows that the world does not adhere to the structure of stylized neoclassical growth models, and some authors have pointed out that divergence, rather than convergence, has been the dominant trend in the world economy (Quah, 1996b;Pritchett, 1997;Easterly, 2006). Others have pointed out that even with economic convergence, the rates may be so slow for some countries that for time horizons of less than a century convergence is irrelevant (Cepni, 2010). Galor (1996) suggests three competing convergence hypotheses: unconditional convergence, which adheres to the predictions of the stylized neoclassical growth models; conditional convergence, which proposes that the neoclassical prediction holds only between countries that are structurally similar; and the club convergence hypothesis, which holds that countries with similar initial incomes experience similar rates of growth, leading to persistent polarization between rich and poor clusters of countries.…”