Issue 43 – Summer 2019

The authors review the communication agenda on the EU Cohesion Policy. In recent years this issue has attracted unprecedented attention, in particular in the context of the debate on the future of the EU budget. Strengthening the communication of cohesion policy can help to boost support for the EU, given that it represents the most tangible expression of EU solidarity on the ground. Consequently, it has become a priority, with both the European Parliament and the Council calling for more efforts. In this paper the authors review the actual regulatory framework and go beyond the provisions to make 10 proposals for improving the communication and visibility of the funds.

The first issue of Investigaciones Regionales (Regional Research) was published in autumn 2002. After 17 years, nearly five hundred pieces have been published, including articles, notes, book reviews, etc. The journal today enjoys a high international prestige: it is indexed in the most important international scientific repositories, such as Clarivate Analytics, Scopus, Latindex, Redalyc, to name a few. The impact factors place the journal at outstanding levels, which makes it a space to consider for authors of Spanish and international institutions that aim to gain recognition of their academic productivity, including accreditations and other official recognitions.

The level achieved is the result of the effort and dedication of many people. First of all, its founder and director, Juan Ramón Cuadrado Roura; then the secretaries, the members of editorial boards and teams, the authors and reviewers, and obviously people like Julieta Llungo, who have made the whole effort worth it. Be these lines a big thank you from the regional science scientific community to all this human team.

Since January 2019, the journal’s management has been assigned to a team of some members of the previous editorial team, and new ones, including myself. I should say that it’s not going to be easy to maintain such a high level, but I honestly think that the journal’s trajectory and prestige make it much easier for it to be so. Therefore, and since there is always room for improvement, we only have to consider growing. When this new team took over the journal, three main objectives were set: to facilitate the transition to a new, open-published online model; to continue with the current trajectory, improving the quality and volume of articles; and to get to include the journal in the Social Science Citation Index of the Journal Citation Report of Clarivate Analytics, the most prestigious list of impact indexes of academic journals.

To achieve these objectives we have moved to use the Open Journal System (OJS) portal of the Spanish Science and Technology Repository (RECYT), reorganized the technical secretariat and continued to improve in the description of publication standards, ethical principles governing the magazine, or copyright, by using the Creative Commons CC BY-NC license, which allows authors to retain maximum control over their work.

The journal publishes now three annual volumes, which may or may not be special volumes.[1] In the last twelve months, a total of 134 works have been received, which have been divided between the generic articles section, two special volumes that will soon see the light, and the notes section. The level of demand of the journal is high: with the vast majority of works not being able to complete the review process, 64% of the works have already been rejected, and almost half of those received do not reach evaluation. Most articles are received in Spanish (60%), because 76% of the works come from Spain (73% of those works are in Spanish) or from American Spanish-speaking countries (85%). The vast majority of jobs are done in co-authorship (50%) and it is not small the volume of articles with more than 3 authors (10%).

Analyzing the figures, we have not found any special association between the rejection rate and the language or geographical origin of the authors, and there is no editorial guideline in this regard. Among the works received so far are those related in a direct or indirect way with tourism, European policy, local or sectoral development; also the European aspects being a constant in the journal.

We want to improve the technical quality of the journal, getting the authors of the journal to be able to link their personal identifiers to their articles (ORDIC, Researcher ID, etc.), as well as to give greater dissemination to the work through the twitter account (@JRR_ InvRegs) and the AECR Blog, La Riqueza de las Regiones (The Wealth of Regions).

Continuing to improve the quality of the journal, its dissemination and scientific and social impact, is the chosen path for Investigaciones Regionales / Journal of Regional Research to maintain its prestige and achieve the proposed goals. We hope that you will continue to consult the contents of the journal and that, if the opportunity arises, you will publicize it in your own works. We believe that it is worth bringing to the rest of the world the valuable experiences that we acquire by studying the regional and local environment that surrounds us, and the impact that global processes have on it, and the economic and social changes we are going through.

Vicente Royuela

Editor in Chief

References

1. Royuela, V. (2017) “Special Issues at REGION”, REGION, 4 (3), pp. E1-E5 doi: https://doi.org/10.18335/region.v4i3.201.
2. ORCID Vicente Royuela https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7647-0063

In the last decade policy makers and scholars have highlighted the capacity of creative industries to stimulate economic growth. However, there is still some debate about the potential effect of reverse causality on this relationship, as creative industries may also be attracted to successful areas. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to disentangle the role played by the existing spatial concentration of these kinds of activity on new firm creation. The main statistical source is the REIC (Catalan Manufacturing Establishments Register), which has plant-level microdata on the location of plants in Catalan municipalities between 2002 and 2007. By using, for the first time, cultural associations as historical instrumental variables, the results confirm the po­tential of creative service industries (CSIs) for creating new firms.

This article assesses how the regional entrepreneurship ecosystem can explain the performance of business incubators and accelerators in Spain. It additionally considers the importance of a systemic approach where the interrelations between business incubators and accelerators with the entrepreneurship ecosystem are cen­tral and innovative. This kind of relationship is assed quantitatively, for the first time in Spain, by using the regional entrepreneurship and development index (REDI) of the European Commission related to the per­formance of a wide public database of business incubators and accelerators. Results show a positive association between a higher REDI and a better performance of the business incubators and accelerators in those regions. This allows for making suggestions both for regional and entrepreneurship policy.

This paper presents a methodology for longitudinal comparative analysis of regional time series. This methodology is integrated by the sheaf of straight lines methodology, proposed by Ferrán (2011), and the multidimensional scaling analysis. The interest of this methodology is that it visualizes the similarities and differences between the dynamics of each of the regions. We present this methodology through an application to the provincial study of unemployment rates in Spain over the period 1991-2018. The results of the analysis confirm the relevance of spatial components in the evolution of the unemployment elasticity over the economic cycle.

The implementation of the System of Autonomy and Care for Dependency has led to the creation of thousands of jobs during the period 2008-2015. However, the employment generated has been significantly lower than initially estimated in Libro Blanco de la Dependencia (Ministerio de Trabajo y Asuntos Sociales, 2005), and territorially it has shown very significant differences. The objective of this article is to offer an explanation to both facts. For that, the gross direct employment generated by the process of implementing the Law for the Promotion of Personal Autonomy and Care for People in Situation of Dependence in each CC.AA. is estimated and it is compared with what could potentially have been achieved by combining two hypothetical situations. First, that there were no benefits recognized and pending of effective provision (situation known as limbo of dependence) and, second, that the cutback introduced by Royal Decree-Law 20/2012 was not applied.

This paper aims to integrate several theoretical bases of social exclusion in an operational definition whose empirical application allows for the construction of exclusion maps at the level of Argentine provinces during 1990-2010, by means of principal component and cluster analysis. Our results reveal the dynamism of this phenomenon in Argentina, both in terms of determining factors and territorial groupings.

The global economic crisis in 2008 impacts Latin America in a context in which a group of progressive gov­ernments had succeeded in managing the destiny of their countries. This paper analyses, at subnational level, the experiences of three countries, in the areas of employment and income inequality: Brazil and Ecuador, in which economic policies were reoriented towards a strong social approach, and which are compared with Mexico, a nation in which the Neo-liberal model was reinforced. The results enable to highlight that while inequality in wage income has been reduced in all those countries as a whole, that has not been the case for specific regions of those nations.

This paper seeks to identify the factors driving air transport services, with special emphasis on the role played by tourism-related variables. Using data on flows of passengers arriving to airports in the Spanish Mediterranean region, we employ panel data regressions for the period 2004-2015. Explanatory factors in the model include variables reflecting the state of development of the tourism market, the size of the local eco­nomic activity, and the presence of low-cost carriers. Cointegration techniques are applied in order to control for the presence of unit roots in variables of the model. Main results show the relevance of tourism activities in explaining air transport passenger services in this area.

In recent years, the topic of trust in public authorities has been extensively analysed, notably with regard to the impact that this has on countries’ development. In this paper, an analysis of three representative European countries (Spain, Denmark, and Belgium) is carried out using data from the European Social Survey. The application of a method based on fuzzy logic and the degree of similarity to the ideal solutions makes it pos­sible to obtain a synthetic indicator of the degree of confidence that the citizens of these respective countries have in the analysed institutions.  This analysis is based on six different dimensions, namely: (1) The National Parliament; (2) The Legal System; (3) The Police; (4) The Politicians; (5) The European Parliament; and (6) The United Nations. The results obtained are conclusive for the current situation of the European Union, and in particular for Spain, where there are indications that the current democratic system is being under­mined by the lack of trust that citizens have in their respective public authorities and institutions.