1 Economic and social convergence in Colombia

GDP has usually been used as a proxy for human well-being. Nevertheless, other social aspects are to be considered, such as life expectancy, infant mortality, educational enrolment, or crime issues. With this paper we investigate not only economic convergence but also social convergence between regions in a developing country, Colombia in the 1975-2005 period. We consider several techniques in our analysis: sigma convergence, stochastic kernels estimations, and also several empirical models to find out the beta convergence parameter (cross section and panel estimates, with and without spatial dependence). The main results confirm that we can talk about convergence in Colombia in key social variables (household available income, literacy rate, life expectancy at birth and non-murder rate), while in others (GDP per capita and infant survival rate) it is not the case. We have also found that spatial autocorrelation reinforces convergence processes through deepening market and social factors, while isolation condemns regions to non convergence