Worldwide Poverty Convergence

Poverty impacts hundreds of millions of people around the world. Poor nutrition, housing and living conditions, and other adverse effects from poverty have a lasting impact on those unfortunate enough to be in poverty. In this paper, I test for convergence of the Watts index of poverty across over forty countries over a period of fifteen years. My model is based on a previous model formulated by Miao and Dhongde (2013). We model the annual average growth rate of the Watts index as a function of the index in the initial year t = 0. We can then test for convergence or divergence across varying time horizons, such as t = 5, 10, or 15 years. We found that there is some significant evidence for divergence of the Watts index, rather than convergence