In 2017 the World Bank published a report: Growing United: Upgrading Europe’s Convergence Machine.  

Since its foundation over sixty years ago, the European Union (EU) has become the modern world's greatest "convergence machine." But our report argues that Europeanshave been increasingly recognizing that convergence is not automatic and the productivity gap between southern and north EU Member States has been widening since the early 2000s. This talk presents recent work on convergence, development traps and the geography of discontent in Europe. It then looks at the challenges that this raises for policies aiming at national and regional convergence.