¿Existe convergencia entre los países de América Latina?[Exist convergence across Latinamerican countries]

This paper studies the evolution of per capita income disparities across Latin America between 1950 and 2008 through an analysis of beta and sigma convergence. Our main objective is to detect whether countries have converged to a common stead state in per capita income or if on the contrary, there is evidence of convergence to differentiated stationary states. A log-lineal neoclassical production function with technology is estimated through dynamic data panel methods. In particular system GMM estimators" are used to remove diverse sources of bias affecting convergence models, including those produced by the spatial dependence among neighboring countries. The results show that until 1985 there seems to be a slow process of convergence of the Latin American countries to a common level of per capita income. From that moment, we find a divergence process, which together with an increase in the dispersion in per capitaincome across countries, let us conclude that the beta convergence is conditional. The main determinants of this process are the rate of investment and public spending.