Primavera 2017

In this article, we start with the origins of «institutional cross-border cooperation» in Europe, covering up to today’s «territorial cooperation». We define and compare the concepts of «institutional cooperation» and «traditional cooperation», focusing on analyzing the former and predicting an approximation between the two types of cooperation. We describe the main legal framework for «institutional cross-border cooperation» and analyse its main instruments, placing special attention on the Euroregion, the European Economic Interest Grouping (EEIG) and the more recent figure of the European Grouping of Territorial Cooperation (EGTC), all of which are important references for territorial cooperation in Europe. We finish with some brief references to the current European integration project, in which border management has become an exceptional test Bedfor deciphering certain keys in this construction process.

The aim of this paper is analyze the causes of fiscal slippage at the regional level in Spain during the period 2005-2015. According to results, the main factors are the deficit deviation of past year, the variation in the deficit target, total revenues provided by the regional financing system, the existence of changes of government and, to a lesser extent, political affinity between incumbents at both central and regional levels. On the contrary, spending increases in the past, the debt burden interest and the electoral cycle are not significant variables.

This article explains the role of scientific communities for the regional innovation, and the importance to seek scientific excellence, but also seek the relevance of their work in their socio-economic context. We study the case of Ensenada, Baja California, Mexico. For this purpose we were applied a questionnaire to 95 researchers. The results demonstrate that the scientific community has acquired national leadership for the quality of their contributions, however, its impact seldom goes beyond the academic environment. From this perspective, we argue that it is vital that the researchers not only strive for the quality of scientific publications, but they also look for meeting the local and regional development requirements.

The main objective of this paper is to examine the effect of econo­mic distance on academic scientific collaboration in peripherical countries in Southern Europe (period 2006-2010). For this purpose, we use co-publications as an indicator of collaboration. Besides, we explore the effect of other proximity notions argued in the extant literature. Our results show that economic distance promotes academic scientific collaboration, supporting the centre-periphery hypothesis. It is also shown that geographic, cognitive, institutional and social proximity facilitates scientific collaboration, while the effect of organizational proximity is not clear.

The unavailability of geographically disaggregated information does not allow obtaining empirical evidence in order to answer some important questions in the field of urban and regional economics. The objective of this work is to calculate the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) at local level, for the 42 municipalities of Valle del Cauca – Colombia in 2010, using ecological inference techniques based on entropy models that have already been applied in Spain and Mexico with satisfactory results.
The proposed method and the application of ecological inference allows of the GDP disaggregated by the 11 economic sectors, a pioneering and very useful work in the region.

The early leaving from education and training rate is a basic indicator in the education system that has influence on economic and social structure. Thus, its reduction is a priority for the Europe 2020 Strategy. Spain has the highest early school leaving rate among the European Union, showing strong interregional differences. This article studies the impact of educational, economic and sociocultural factors on the early school leaving rate at the NUTS2 regions. We have applied a panel data methodology for the period 2001 to 2011. Among other results, expenditure on education appears as a relevant measure for tackling this problem.

This paper develops a model which integrates the foral or cupo system applied to the Basque Country and Navarre, the common system applied to the other fifteen Spanish autonomous communities and the central government budget. The model shows that the theoretical cupo it generates is nothing more than an indirect form of measuring the equalising transfer between the central government and the corresponding autonomous jurisdiction. The cupo form per se is completely neutral: the foral jurisdictions operate exactly under the same financial conditions as the non-foral jurisdictions, despite that in the latter case the transfer is directly measured as the difference between expenditure needs and fiscal capacity. In the context of our model, the cause of the foral economic advantage is the particular imputation procedure developed by the cupo law, which clearly biases the scales in favour of the foral and, therefore, against the non-foral communities. An economic advantage of the foral respect to the aggregate of the non-foral communities that, even if only referred to the design of the cupo, we have estimated at 29.8% in the case of the Basque Country and at 28.2% in the case on Navarre. These calculations should be interpreted as a lower bound on the foral advantage. The model has clear implications for reform.

The aim of this paper is to analyze the degree of consensus in the literature on the impact of institutions on economic growth, for which we differentiate between three dimensions: economic, political and social institutions. After a literature review from 1990 to today, as main conclusion we find that, generally, the revised authors find a positive effect of economic institutions and social capital and negative effect of political instability, while political freedom has less clear results. On the other hand, it can also be concluded that there are insufficient studies on the differences in the estimated effects and the sequence of implementation between dimensions, showing the necessity of more empirical analysis about this topic.

Historical Evolution, Analytical Categorisations and Institutional Challenges of Metropolitanisation