Investigating Agricultural Productivity Growth and Convergence in Iran and Eastern African Countries

Abstract

The issue of convergence or divergence of productivity has important policy for regional poverty reduction and increasing standards of living. If productivity converges to a common level without intervention, there is little need for explicit policies in lagging regions to promote catch up. On the other hand, productivity has divergence trend, then explicit policies would be needed to prevent further lagging of TFP and standard of living. Therefore, with regard to importance subject, this paper in finding out whether Iran and Eastern African countries in agriculture have managed to narrow their productivity gap? The results show that the range changes of average TFP growth lies between -4.9 percent in Rwanda countries and 1.1 percent in Iran and Somalia. The results of convergence test indicate that, from among 9 countries under consideration only five countries, be converging to the mean. Therefore, these countries managed to make better use of new available technologies, thus reaching far greater productivity levels than others. On the opposite, convergence can not be accepted for the rest countries.