A Matter of Time: Revisiting Growth Convergence in China

China’s unbalanced growth strategy has seemingly fostered growing inter-regional growth disparities and there is little evidence of wealth trickling down from richer provinces to poorer provinces. Standard convergence tests, however, may be ill specified to detect underlying long-term growth trends in small samples due to the pronounced and frequent inter-regional short-term fluctuations. Our paper suggests a novel approach to distinguish between these long-term growth trends and short-term fluctuations. Based on provincial data from 1978 to 2009, our results indicate that China’s provinces only diverge over the shortterm. Over the long term, provinces cluster into two converging growth clubs.