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AN IMPORTANT economic question is whether poor countries or regions tend to converge toward rich ones. We want to know, for example, whether the poor countries of Africa, South Asia, and Latin America will grow faster than the developed countries, whether the south of Italy will become like its north, whether and how fast the eastern regions of Germany will attain the prosperity of the western regions, and-in a historical context-how the American South became nearly as well off as the North.

Although some economic theories predict convergence, the empirical evidence has been a subject of debate. In this study we add to the evidence by extending our previous analysis of economic growth across the US states.'We examine the growth and dispersion of personal income since 1880 and relate the patterns for individual states to the behavior of regions. We then analyze the interplay between net migration and …