Socio-Economic Convergence as a Necessary Precondition and Determinant of Societal Growth

Abstract The issue of socio-economic convergence is nowadays more than ever an extremely dominant topic, especially in the case of less developed countries and countries suffering stagnation, mainly due to the integration processes occurring worldwide and the determinant to achieve long-term growth in an effort to advance towards the socioeconomic sustainable level of developed economies. A key assumption towards convergence is that economies with initially lower socio-economic levels will at some point reach (in an idea case) or get very close the level of developed economies, gradually reducing the gap between the capital stock and the level of product size between countries, while the lower economic level the country has, the higher the growth rate it will go through the transition period. This suggests that the economies with lower levels of performance will grow on average at a higher rate than economies that are more efficient. It is therefore expected that the growth performance of a country will with its improvement also at some point slow down and quite realistically there can also occur a situation where the levels of development and growth of individual states economies will rather show delay. This is basically an opposite action to the concept of convergence, which is known as the divergence. The aim of our research paper is to analyze closely the concept of convergence, while pointing it is specifically characteristics and overall focusing on the significance of the issue of convergence.