Primavera 2009

Regional and Cohesion Policy constitutes one of the major priorities of the European Union. As a result of the increasing concern of public authorities and society towards the use and results of public resources, evaluation activities have become an integral component of the process of modernization and rationalization of public policies, which has led to the institutionalization of evaluation in the European Regional and Cohesion policy-making process. In this context, this paper presents, first, a theoretical and conceptual revision of both regional policy and its evaluation. The historical evolution explains the plurality and methodological diversity that exists nowadays in the theoretical field of the evaluation of regional policy. Secondly, the results of a detailed analysis of the evaluation methodologies that are actually applied by regional development plans and programs in the European Union are exposed, to finally show the existing discrepancy between theory and practice in the field of evaluation of European Regional Policy.

In literature, analyses can be found of the competitiveness of international tourist destinations, based on tourist satisfaction with different attributes. However, most of these analyses do not use one single measure to make a global assessment, which makes it difficult to compare destinations. The aim of this paper is twofold. First, some alternatives that can be used as a synthetic index of tourist satisfaction are discussed. Second, the indices that are proposed are used to analyse a group of rival destinations for the European sun and sand tourism market. From the results that are obtained, the advantages of each of the proposed indices are discussed.

The agricultural policy in Spain has been involved in substantial changes which have implied some adjustments on the levels of support and its instruments. After the "Mid Term Review" of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) more and more of its instruments are applied with varied intensity at the regional level. In this context, an information system about agricultural support that allows the monitoring and evaluation of the support and its regional distribution becomes necessary. This work makes use of the progress undertaken by OECD in defining a methodology to estimate support to the agricultural sector.

This paper advances the analysis of regional income convergence in Colombia, through the use of the income data recently estimated for the departments, the main subnational political units. The results show a polarization process between Bogotá and the rest of the departments. The preponderance of Bogotá during the period analyzed is also discussed: its per capita income is more than double that of the national average, and more than eight times the per capita income of the poorest department, Chocó. Persistence in the departmental per capita income ranking is observed: Bogotá is always ahead, while the departments in the periphery are in the last places. The findings lead to the conclusion that it is necessary to design policies to correct the significant disparities in per capita income between Colombian regions.

As a result of recent Spanish labour market reforms, the overall permanent contracts have been divided in three groups: regular open-ended contracts, subsidized permanent contracts from the conversion of fixed-term contracts and subsidized initial open-ended contracts. The first objective of this paper is to analyze the impact of these types of permanent contracts versus fixed-term contracts on the immigrant population in comparison with the native one. The second aim pretends to shed new light on the quality of immigrant´s jobs contrasting the existence of occupational segregation. The methodology used for the first aim, consists in estimating multinomial logit models where the dependent variable shows the contractual arrangements of the workers. For the second aim, indexes of occupational segregation by type of contract are obtained. This analysis is done separately for Andalusia and for the rest of Spain, distinguishing employees with less or more experience to observe the process of labour market assimilation of immigrants. The data used in this work comes from the “Muestra Continua de Vidas Laborales” (MTAS, 2006).

This piece of work is aimed at disentangling the factors affecting the balance between personal, family and working life. To this end we undertake an empirical approach by means of several econometric techniques. The estimation of these models is based on data coming from an ad hoc survey. The results of the analysis allow us to conclude that policy measures designed to increase men co-responsibility are a key issue to improve women’s work-family-life balance.

The eighties saw the emergence of a new conception of economic and social development in Spain. The locally appeared as a new tool for action and improvement over the territory. More than twenty years of operating the same, this note reflects on the evolution and current configuration of this phenomenon materialized in figure-Agent or the Local Development Agency (LDA). To do so, and since most prominent data obtained in an investigation conducted in the Valencia region of La Ribera Alta, proposes a decalogue of key issues or challenges for the future model of local development.

Transport infrastructure contributes to social welfare when a basic condition is fulfilled: social benefits should exceed social costs. It has been common to see infrastructure with a biased perspective leading to the belief that the more, the bigger and the more advance technologically the better. The concept of opportunity cost of public money does not seem to be understood by many who take crucial decisions on the construction of new large projects. In this paper, the economic evaluation of projects is defended as a way to avoid the construction of socially unprofitable projects.