Large-order behaviour due to ultraviolet renormalons in QCD

Ultraviolet renormalons, contrary to their infrared counterparts, lead to a universal contribution to the large-order behaviour of perturbative expansions in QCD. In this letter, we determine the nature of the leading ultraviolet renormalon singularity for the inclusive hadroproduction cross section in e+e- annihilation, for hadronic τ decays and the moments of deepinelastic scattering structure functions. We comment on the relevance of ultraviolet renormalons to estimates in low orders of perturbation theory.