What is Per Capita GDP Differential

Convergence in growth for emerging nations has always been an important topic of economic discourse. This study looks into the growth convergence of selected basket of emerging nations towards selected basket of developed nations using Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) framework. The findings of the study show that not only the economic indicators of the respective emerging nations are responsible towards narrowing the per capita GDP differential between developed and emerging nations, but also the differentials of economic indicators between developed and emerging nations are important. This helps towards answering the paradoxical question why in spite of taking the best measures the developing countries are unable to match up with their developed counterparts' per capita GDP. Finally, the study shows significant positive relationship between GDP growth rate and carbon dioxide emission.