Discussion: Data on convergence
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Has Mexico converged to US standards of living, or Greece to Germany? If not, what progress has been made?
Find and download data for real GDP (or GNI) per person for at least three countries, one of which represents a (regional or global) standard of living to which poorer countries would want to converge. (For example, the US is the global as well as American standard; Germany a European standard; Japan an Asian standard, etc.)
Calculate the ratio of GDP (or GNI) per person of the other two countries to your leader country, and chart these ratios.
Post the chart together with a brief explanation of convergence and the particular example at hand!
Be creative about which countries you analyze. As a class, we can gather a whole lot of information about regional and global convergence (or the lack thereof)! Possible data sources include the Penn World Tables (Links to an external site.) as well as the World Bank Database (Links to an external site.). Please engage your classmates through comments! Note that this discussion assignment closely follows end-of-chapter exercise 7 of chapter 10. You should study the issue of convergence in chapter 10 before doing this exercise.
To upload an image of your chart directly into your post, upload it to “Files” — which you can find under your name on the very top right — and then link to it, via the little tree icon in the menu bar of your post.
UPDATE: Please make sure that you create a chart that shows the ratio of one country’s GDP per capita to that of another country’s GDP per capita — see the first bullet point above! See this video for some guidance:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APuwDg2lqIg&list=UU1TXJOk7BOIDUsvXF5NMz1Q (Links to an external site.)