Examining Convergence in Per Capita Agricultural Production across Selected Asian countries

Since 1990s, the convergence issue has become an important field of econometric research. In recent years, a remarkable evolution of convergence literature is found in the area of agricultural economics. This article demonstrates ?- and ?-convergence of per capita gross production value of agriculture (PGVA) across seventeen Asian countries from three geographical regions, i.e. South Asia, East Asia, and Southeast Asia, for the period of 1961-2011. These countries are embodied in this study because of the substantial contribution of agriculture to their economies. The data of PGVA have been created using annual gross agricultural production value divided by the total population of each country under sample and obtained from the FAOSTAT online database. The fixed effects (FE) and random effects (RE) panel data models are employed in examining ? and ?-convergence. The two-way FE and RE models by adding time effects are found to be most appropriate for determining ?-convergence at any level of significance. However, the empirical results of FE and RE models strongly support the ? convergence, and are highly statistically significant at any conventional levels over the examination period.