Primavera 2016

The paper describes the process and main results of the 2014-2020 actions for the promotion of R&D and innovation in Spain. Under the frame of the general strategy «Europe 2020», the R&D and innovation policy is highlighted as one of the main priorities. Here they are analyzed the ex-ante conditions and the «principle of thematic concentration» of the new communitarian law. In particular, we describe the articulation between the Spanish Strategy on Science, Technology and Innovation and the specific regional programmes derived from the RIS3. Finally, regional and intervention categories distributions of the FEDER resources are displayed and the potential contribution to the goal of reaching up the R&D expenditure related to the GDP to a 2 per cent in the 2020 is estimated.

One of the economic policies used by governments for local and regional development is the encouragement of entrepreneurship through business incubators, which contribute to the creation of companies and employment, increase business survival rates and the payment of taxes and social contributions to public administration. However, they are consumers of external resources and have a high dependence on the Public Sector. In this study we analyse the net contribution of these business initiative centres in Galicia (Spain) through the use of the «Integral Model of profitability of business incubators» based on structural equations.

The objective of this study is to analyze how the characteristics of the environment associated with agricultural activities influence the prices of rural tourism accommodation. To this end the model of hedonic prices is applied, which allows to break down the price of a good or service depending on the characteristics that it entails, including those of its environment. The study is carried out in the autonomous community of Asturias. The results indicate that the market values positively accommodation establishments located in municipalities with a high percentage of forests and pastureland, and negatively those located in municipalities with a high percentage of cultivated land. The study serves as a starting point for cost-benefit analysis of the policies aimed to promote activities that will improve the rural environment.

Using the method proposed by Herrero and Villar (2012), in which multiple distributions of categorical data are evaluated and ordered, we study the evolution of nationalist identity in Spain based on opinion surveys regarding the state of Spanish Autonomous Communities (AC) carried out by Spain’s Centre for Sociological Research (CIS, acronym in Spanish) since 1998. We construct two indices based on the value vectors of the Herrero-Villar method that describe the evolution of nationalist identity in each of Spain’s ACs, with respect to the rest of the ACs in each of the surveys, and with respect to their own AC across the surveys

The national statistics system presents a remarkable flaw: there is no set of indicators that allows a homogeneous comparison of the economic performance of the 24 Argentinean provinces. The Provincial Activity Composite Index (ISAP) intends to fill that void. It consists of a system of 25 coincident indicators (one for each province and one for the country level) whose variations are obtained as a weighted mean of the variations of several variables that strongly correlate to the economic performance. In this presentation, we review the existing literature on the subject, deeply describe the methodology used and present our results. ISAP becomes a very relevant tool for provincial economic monitoring, as well as for design and assessment of specific policies for each province. Moreover, the flexibility of this methodology allows for replicability in other countries that lack this kind of information.

This paper analyses the relocation of R&D establishments between French’s Zones d’Emploi in the 2008 to 2010 period. We find that small size establishments predominate in these relocations, which occur mostly around major urban areas and in a short distance from the original location (although a negative relation between distance and size seems to exist). Lastly, estimates from a gravity model for origin-destination flows show that the main determinants of the relocation of R&D establishments include agglomeration economies, labour market characteristics, institutional features, transport infrastructures and educational levels. However, there are substantial differences in the way these variables affect intra- and inter-ZdE flows.

The importance of the transport costs for micro and macro geographical analyses regarding economic accessibility, interterritorial trade patterns, or regional localization and productive specialization, is nowadays paramount. Many studies have been devoted to defining and measuring transport costs from the point of view of a static cross-section perspective. However, when it comes to characterizing their evolution time, a suitable dynamic framework has not been yet presented. In this context, the contribution of this note consists on improving the existing methodology to accurately measure the change in generalized transport costs over time within the economic theory approach to index numbers and, by doing so, provide a consistent decomposition of these changes that allows us to determine precisely the effects that both economic and infrastructure determinants have on transport costs variation. 

The article examines the concept of intangible territorial legend at various scales, from local to regional or national level, and its relationship to the construction of ethnic myths and the emergence of translocal traditions. For this, the methodology of the studies and notions chorographic ecotype and cultural landscape and ethnography of the symbolic light of concepts such as the classic «Temenos» and modern as the «mytho-moteur» territories are reviewed (Abadal). Case studies that show how the Imaginary, interacting with geo-historical factors, the often narrows and perimetrea territory through channels such as the legendary fable and paralitúgicos rites such as processions or pilgrimages apply. The conclusion is that the legends and archetypes of ethnic origin and family traditions that create rewrite identities and can be projected on different fields of politics or recreational life, with equally different profiles.