This paper assesses Brazil's real convergence (1822–2019) through unit root tests and Markov Regime-Switching (MS) models in three different scenarios: towards (i) other six Latin American countries (LA6); (ii) Portugal; and (iii) the technological frontier country, the US. The extended unit root test results favour Brazil's very long-run real convergence towards LA6 and Portugal, but not the US. The estimated MS models, involving two different regimes, real convergence and real non-convergence/divergence, capture institutional quality's positive effect in promoting Brazil's real convergence.

This paper seeks to provide a comprehensive overview of the long-term factors that explain divergent price levels across developed and emerging European countries. We provide stylised facts about the structural factors that influence market and non-market-based service, house and goods prices. The stylised facts show that there is much more behind differences in price levels among European countries than the much heralded Balassa-Samuelson effect and that prices other than those of market services are potential determinants of price levels and inflation rates in emerging Europe. Finally, we sketch out the possible mismatches between price level convergence and inflation rates.

This article examines the real convergence hypothesis in eleven emerging countries by means of fractionally integrated techniques. For this purpose, we examine the order of integration of the real GDP per capita series in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, Venezuela, India, Indonesia, Taiwan and South Korea as well as their differences with respect to the US and Japan. We find evidence of smaller degrees of integration in the differenced series only for some of the Latin American countries with respect to the US, and for all the Asian countries with respect to both the US and Japan. However, we only find evidence of real convergence for the cases of Argentina and Chile with respect to the US, and Taiwan with respect to Japan, suggesting thus the possibility of different convergence clubs among both Latin American and Asian countries.