the issue of convergence or divergence of productivity has important policy for regional poverty reduction and increasing standards of living. if productivity converges to a common level without intervention, there is little need for explicit policies in lagging regions to promote catch up. on the other hand, productivity has divergence trend, then explicit policies would be needed to prevent f...

A survey of the major theories or approaches to psychotherapy (Patterson, 1966) reveals considerable diversity. Various points of view appear to differ widely in philosophy and concepts, in goals or objectives, and in methods or techniques. Not only do the points of view differ as presented by their principal proponents, but there are often schools within schools. And in addition there are diff...

abstract this paper attempts to re-investigate the catching-up (stochastic convergence) hypothesis among the selected 16 oecd countries applying the time series approach of convergence hypothesis with annual data over one century. to reach this aim, we propose a model which specifies a trend function, incorporating both types of structural breaks – that is, sharp breaks and smooth shifts using ...