Convergence in Public Expenditure Across a Sample of Emerging Countries: Evidence from Club Convergence

The goal of this article is to investigate convergence in public expenditure for a panel of nineteen emerging countries spanning the period 1990–2012. The study applies the methodology of the club convergence methodology to various categories of public expenditure to assess the presence of convergence clubs. I consider eleven alternative categories of public expenditure. The results do not support the hypothesis that all emerging countries converge to a single equilibrium state in public expenditure. Countries demonstrate a high degree of convergence in the sense that in the majority of the cases, these expenditures form only two or three convergence clubs.