Handbook of Economic Growth

4.6.1 Data

Historically, one obstacle to work on regional growth has been the scattered nature of the available data. Researchers on national growth have long been able to draw on the Penn World Table and the World Development Indicators, but there is no close equivalent for sub-national data. Recently this has begun to change, in contributions by Gennaioli et al. (2013a,b), Lessmann (2011), and Mitton (2013). The regional data sets of Gennaioli et al. (2013a) and Mitton (2013) are especially comprehensive; the first covers 1569 regions from 110 countries, which together account for 74% of the world’s land area and 97% of its GDP. Mitton’s data set is broadly similar in coverage, but partially corrects for internal variation in the cost of ...