Title: Causality clubs: grouping countries with cluster causality detection

Authors: Manuel de Mier; Fernando Delbianco; Fernando Tohmé

Addresses: Department of Economics, Universidad Torcuato di Tella, Buenos Aires, Argentina ' Department of Economics, Universidad Nacional del Sur, San Andrés 800, Bahía Blanca (B8002), Argentina; INMABB-CONICET, Av. Alem 1253, Bahía Blanca (B8002), Argentina ' Department of Economics, Universidad Nacional del Sur, San Andrés 800, Bahía Blanca (B8002), Argentina; INMABB-CONICET, Av. Alem 1253, Bahía Blanca (B8002), Argentina

Abstract: This paper explores the heterogeneity of causal structures of economic growth among countries by proposing a two-step procedure. First, we apply a causal discovery technique to uncover the underlying causal structure for each country. Second, we employ hierarchical clustering over these estimates to identify groups of similar countries in terms of their causal relationships. We obtain five 'causality clubs', each one associated with a different structure of causal determinations of the growth process. We find that the usual associations between income or geographical location and the nature of economic growth processes may not always hold true.

Keywords: causality clubs; cluster causality detection; causal structure; heterogeneity; economic growth.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCEE.2025.147779

International Journal of Computational Economics and Econometrics, 2025 Vol.15 No.3, pp.294 - 312

Received: 19 Feb 2024
Accepted: 13 Apr 2025
Published online: 31 Jul 2025 *

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