Otoño 2011

The debate over the impact of education on economic growth has recently led to disagreement when, at the empirical level, the effect of average human capital on economic growth has been found to be weak. With this paper we revisit these results by arguing how different educational attainment levels (rather than the average human capital stock) impact heterogenously different regions’ economic performance. We build and test a catch-up model where technology adoption takes place as a function of each region’s human capital composition. We show for 50 NUTS3 Spanish provinces in between 1965 and 1997, how convergence to the frontier is driven by higher education and, to a lesser extent, by vocational training. Both theoretical and empirical results are alternative to the well known formalization proposed by Vandenbussche, Aghion and Meghir (2006). Severe endogeneity issues, as well as small sample biases, are tackled by using system GMM estimators and the correction proposed by Windmeijer (2005).

This paper presents an implementation of shift share analysis of national tourism between the Spanish peninsular autonomous communities with overnight stays in hotels data. Thus, it achieves a more complete interpretation of the available statistical information. Among other things, it allows us to know the position which each region has in terms of specialization and competitive advantage and, hence, the potential markets for development can be identified.

In the increasingly urban world in which we live, replete with phenomena of congestion and mobility problems often stem from poorly managed clusters, or simply not run, emerge clearly the difficulties arising from the operation of the center by suburban rings. This situation is exacerbated when the city is also capital. Thus, in this paper we study first the existence of exploitation to, secondly, to proceed to a specific case study: Santiago de Compostela, a city to which they have been found and quantified the central charges.

During last years, a central issue of theory debate and economic policy is clearly manufacture clusters and the local capabilities which take part,promote and condition its competitiveness. This article analyzes two local experiences in Argentina —the Agricultural Machinery District and Las Parejas Cluster— connecting topics such as innovation, learning and other difficulties (endogenous and exogenous), which disturb the normal cluster operations of local industrialized agglomerations. From this perspective, innovation processes, firm relationships and institutional network actions are analyzed. This study concludes with some associations which identify similar local trajectories from others periphery experiences.

Using survey data on a representative sample of the productive private Catalonian network (1,238 firms) and in line with the international empirical evidence, this research paper analyzes the new co-innovative (ICT uses, skilled labour and new forms of work organization) productivity sources. The results have enabled us to identify a competitive pattern marked by the decisive contribution of physical productive capital. In addition, a segmentation of the business sample suggests the existence of two distinct patterns in productivity sources. In technology and knowledge intensive-firms (about one fifth of the total) the sources of productivity level is bases on physical productive capital, new work organizations systems and complementarities between then and the use of ICT. By the rest of Catalan firms (80% who do not use technology and knowledge intensive) has not found evidence to corroborate the existence of new co-innovation sources in the explanation of their long term potential growth.

The aim of this paper is to show a general view of the local property tax. We want to check how is applied in many countries, which are the differences and similarities with the spanish tax, which are his virtues and faults and which can be the solutions of his problems. Although his general international application, there are many particularities between countries taxes. The spanish tax is efficient and sufficient but not equitable or simple. Politicians have been working to solve these, but they haven’t been able to achieve totally yet.

The emphasis today has taken the phenomenon of socioeconomic development planning, through implementation of measures to promote employment, promotion of business and/or revitalization of local resources, requires a reference model with goals, a structure and operational means well defined. On this premise, in this article we reflect on the current model of local economic development- implanted since the early eighties, and analyzes its main shortcomings hypothesized background, the need for a time of economic crisis as the current model and its central figure-Agent-Employment and Local Development to undertake a redefinition of its constituents to enable them to face the future with guaranteed success.

The goal of this paper is to study the structural change in the Andalusian economy during the period 2000-2005 using social accounting matrices. Although there are several methods, the causative matrix approach has been used to analyze the above mentioned change. The study has been done using a matrix with 26 productive sectors and three endogenous accounts, labor income, capital income and private consumption. The results show that changes vary from one to another sector and cause of these may be due to influence of own sector, of rest of the sectors or of both.

Este artículo es el resumen del proyecto europeo IAREG (Intangible Assets and Regional Economic Growth), en el que se analiza el papel de los activos intangibles en el crecimiento económico regional. Nos centramos en algunos de ellos, en concreto los más relevantes, sobre los que se dispone de mejor información estadística y sobre los que el consorcio del proyecto tenía mayor experiencia. Los cuatro activos analizados son: capital de conocimiento, capital humano, capital social y capital emprendedor. Además del efecto sobre el crecimiento económico regional se han analizado sus efectos sobre la localización de las empresas. Para cada activo, se proporciona sus principales características, los indicadores con los cuales cuantificarlos y sus limitaciones, así como los principales resultados de la investigación efectuada. Para mejorar en el análisis de los efectos de estos activos intangibles en el crecimiento regional, se requiere disponer de más y mejores datos. Se presentan algunas reflexiones sobre ello, fruto de la experiencia de la investigación realizada. Finalmente, se ofrecen las principales implicaciones políticas y recomendaciones sugeridas alrededor de este tema.

In this work we go through the economic literature that has quantified in the last years the macroeconomic effects of public infrastructures at the regional level. The paper offers, from the point of view of the authors, a review of the most significant contributions to the production function and cost function approaches. In the analysis we put the emphasis on results obtained for the Spanish economy. Likewise, the conclusions are entirely devoted to extract recommendations, that should be taken in mind, when designing public investment policies of infrastructure endowment in Spain.