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Thursday, 11 March 2021 10:35

New Issue 49 of Investigaciones Regionales - Journal of Regional Research

Summary of Volume 49 Investigaciones Regionales - Journal of Regional Research

Volume 49 of the Journal of Regional Research – Investigaciones Regionales has been published, including up to 8 papers. This issue opens with the work devoted to European Issues, and is titled “Performance of nonbanking organisations granting guarantees within cohesion policy”. Professors Halina Waniak-Michalak, Jan Michalak and Maciej Turala study a less studied mechanism of European Policy: the mechanism for guarantee distribution, which is mainly distributed through NGOs (nonbanking organisations granting guarantees – NOGG). The article studies the relationship between the level of regional development, the experience of nonbanking organisations granting guarantees and their performance. The results confirm that there exist positive associations between the level of regional development, NOGG size (measured with guarantee capital) and experience and some financial performance measures, and calls for future EU-wide comparative research allowing deeper understanding of various guarantee distribution mechanisms performance.

Within the articles section we find the paper titled “Optimal Taxation and Decentralization: The case of the PIT”, authored by Professor Alejandro Esteller. He wonders whether decentralization might be welfare-enhancing. To asses this, he focuses on a paradigmatic legal element: the top marginal tax rate on labor income. Taking advantage of the theoretical framework of the recent optimal tax theory he compares – from microdata of the Survey of Life Conditions (conducted by the Spanish National Statistical Institute – the real rates with the optimal ones. There is a discrepancy for all ACs; being for all of them the optimal rate above the real one. According to his results, all but four ACs have set their tax rate closing the gap with their optimum.

The article “Advanced estimation of regional growth using LSTM neural networks”, authored by Juan de Lucio, studies the incorporation of Artificial Intelligence techniques to the set of tools available for the analysis of the regional situation. The estimates using neural networks are compared with the most common instruments in the analysis of conjuncture. Results show that advances in neural networks can be incorporated into the tools used in regional economic analysis reducing the estimation error. They are complementary tools, with greater flexibility to capture the diversity of situations in the real economy and with a higher estimation capacity. The document suggests the use of these types of techniques to solve a variety of problems in regional research.

Angeles Cámara and Ana Medina publish the work “Measuring the economic impact of immigrant workers exit from Madrid region labor market”. This paper analyses the economic impact of the loss of employment suffered by the immigrant population in Madrid’s regional economy during the period 2010-2016. First, it examines the labour characteristics of the immigrant population, a community mainly employed in unstable and low-skilled jobs and overrepresented in economic sectors that are sensitive to fluctuations in the labour market. Financial crisis forced these workers exiting labour market and the present work focuses on the modelling of this phenomenon by means of the construction of a multisectoral model of the supply-side type (Ghosh model), and provides estimates of the direct impacts of the immigrant working population leaving the labour market, and of its indirect and induced impacts on the greater economy.

The next paper is titled “Is there a political bias in the municipal distribution of regional funds? The example of the Region of Murcia”, being the authors Ana-María Ríos, María-Dolores Guillamón, Antonio-José García and Bernardino Benito. This paper aims studies the criteria that determine the amount of funds received by the 45 municipalities that comprise the Region of Murcia, where there is no local funding law, from the autonomous government during the period 2009-2017. Our results show that, contrary to expectations, no political factors are sufficiently relevant to determine the transfers received. On the other hand, it is found that budgetary criteria of sufficiency, investment and per capita debt are the most important ones to explain the transfers received by the municipalities.

Another paper dealing with local issues in the one authored by Francisca J. Sánchez-Sánchez, Ana M. Sánchez-Sánchez, Noemí Pulido, and Diego V. Borrero and titled “Measuring the labour efficiency in Andalusia (Spain): A DEA approach”. This paper analyses the labour efficiency in Andalusia, and takes into account labour and demographic characteristics of the Andalusian municipalities. Using Data Envelopment Analysis, they find differences at the municipal level that depend on the geographical arrangement, with the provincial capitals being the least efficient. An inverse relationship is established between the size of the municipality (in terms of number of inhabitants) and its labour efficiency: the smaller the size of the municipality, the greater the efficiency. The distance to the capital is also important in establishing the efficiency.

The next paper of this issue is “Obstacles and innovation capabilities from a regional perspective: the case of Patagonia in Argentina”, and is coauthored by Valeria Arza and Emanuel López. They compare the effect of external obstacles and internal capabilities on firms’ innovation and productivity in Patagonia versus the rest of the country for 2014-2016. Their hypothesis is that the regional context influences those effects. They find that in that region external obstacles affect, not only the decisions to invest in innovation, as it happens nationally, but also its intensity. Internal capabilities are lower than in the rest of the country but have a greater impact to encourage innovation decisions. They suggest that the regional dimension should be considered in innovation policy.

The last paper is titled “Regional analysis of the private label in online shopping” and the authors are Eloy Gil Cordero, Francisco Javier Rondan Cataluña, Manuel Rey Moreno. Their main objective is to analyze regional consumer behavior when purchasing a private label (PL) product online, based on the relationships of the PL with respect to the online PL quota by regions in Spain, assortment of online PLs and purchase online of PLs. In this study, a total of 17,484 online purchases of PL and 92,094 online purchases of manufacturers' brands were analyzed. By means of latent class regression models, they find that the relation between PL purchase amount and the variables total purchase amount, purchase of unbranded products and manufacturers brands in the online channel varies between regions, not having an equal behavior for all online users, even using the same retail environment.

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ISSN: 1695-7253     E-ISSN: 2340-2717

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