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.