Assessment of Beta Convergence across Regions in Viet Nam through Spatial Regression

Abstract

This paper appliesthe spatial regression to investigate the existence of beta convergence across regions in Viet Nam. The data of GDP per capita for 63 provinces during the period from 2011 to 2014are collected from the Vietnam General Statistics Office’s database. The result indicates that there is a positive spatial dependence between provinces which share a common border. This implies that studying about economic relationships between regions may result in biased and inconsistent estimators if omitting the spatial auto-regression or produce inefficient estimators if ignoring the spatial auto-correlation. In addition, this article provides statistical evidence on the absolute convergence of per capita income in Viet nam. The rate of convergence is approximately 7.13%. With this convergence rate, the time span to reduce poverty gap by half among the provinces is about 10 years.

Keywords

• hồi quy không gian
• hội tụ tuyệt đối
• mô hình durbin không gian
• mô hình sai số không gian mô hình tự hồi quy không gian