Economic Transition and Growth: A Replication

Phillips and Sul (Journal of Applied Econometrics 2009, 24 , 1153–1185) provide an algorithm to identify convergence clubs in a dynamic factor model of economic transition and growth. We provide a narrow replication of their key results, using the open source R software instead of the original GAUSS routines. We are able to exactly replicate their results on convergence clubs, corresponding point estimates and standard errors. We comment on minor differences between their reported results and their clustering algorithm. We propose simple adjustments of the original algorithm to make manual intervention unnecessary. The adjustments allow automated application of the algorithm to other data. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.