Accessibility dynamics and regional cross-border cooperation (CBC) perspectives in the portuguese—spanish borderland

Accessibility plays a major role in achieving sustainable transport, and therefore urban and regional sustainability. The urban public transport system promotes mobility and realizes a large part of urban movements. Moreover, improving accessibility in order to promote sustainable transport requires the application of new concepts and indicators as a powerful tool in the process of creating a balanced urban transport system. In this regard, one of the main goals of this research is to present an overview of the relevant accessibility indicators and assessment of accessibility in regional Cross-Border Cooperation (CBC) in order to transcendence challenges and obstacles for sustainable transportation in these regions along of Portuguese-Spanish border. This paper focuses on the accessibility of cross-border cooperation scenarios along the border regions of Alto Alentejo (Portugal) and Badajoz (Spain) where the Case Study Research Method (CSR) made it possible to recognize accessibility as a key factor in territorial success. Also, accessibility analysis can assess improvements as well as regional imbalances. In addition, this methodology can be used to identify missing links, which requires new investments enabling long-term sustainability.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Population Aging and International Capital Flows

We use the neoclassical growth framework to model international capital flows in an economy with exogenous demographic change. We compare model implications and actual current account data and find that the model explains a small but significant fraction of capital flows between OECD countries, in particular after 1985.current account; international capital mobility; demographics; Feldstein-Horioka puzzle

Climate change adaptation in European river basins

This paper contains an assessment and standardized comparative analysis of the current water management regimes in four case-studies in three European river basins: the Hungarian part of the Upper Tisza, the Ukrainian part of the Upper Tisza (also called Zacarpathian Tisza), Alentejo Region (including the Alqueva Reservoir) in the Lower Guadiana in Portugal, and Rivierenland in the Netherlands. The analysis comprises several regime elements considered to be important in adaptive and integrated water management: agency, awareness raising and education, type of governance and cooperation structures, information management and—exchange, policy development and—implementation, risk management, and finances and cost recovery. This comparative analysis has an explorative character intended to identify general patterns in adaptive and integrated water management and to determine its role in coping with the impacts of climate change on floods and droughts. The results show that there is a strong interdependence of the elements within a water management regime, and as such this interdependence is a stabilizing factor in current management regimes. For example, this research provides evidence that a lack of joint/participative knowledge is an important obstacle for cooperation, or vice versa. We argue that there is a two-way relationship between information management and collaboration. Moreover, this research suggests that bottom-up governance is not a straightforward solution to water management problems in large-scale, complex, multiple-use systems, such as river basins. Instead, all the regimes being analyzed are in a process of finding a balance between bottom-up and top–down governance. Finally, this research shows that in a basin where one type of extreme is dominant—like droughts in the Alentejo (Portugal) and floods in Rivierenland (Netherlands)—the potential impacts of other extremes are somehow ignored or not perceived with the urgency they might deserv

Europe’s Growth Emergency

Highlights: • The European Union growth agenda has become even more pressing because growth is needed to support public and private sector deleveraging, reduce the fragility of the banking sector, counter the falling behind of southern European countries and prove that Europe is still a worthwhile place to invest. • The crisis has had a similar impact on most European countries and the US: a persistent drop in output level and a growth slowdown. This contrasts sharply with the experience of the emerging countries of Asia and Latin America. • Productivity improvement was immediate in the US, but Europe hoarded labour and productivity improvements were in general delayed. Southern European countries have hardly adjusted so far. • There is a negative feedback loop between the crisis and growth, and without effective solutions to deal with the crisis, growth is unlikely to resume. National and EU-level policies should aim to foster reforms and adjustment and should not risk medium-term objectives under the pressure of events. A more hands-on approach, including industrial policies, should be considered

A Panel Cointegration study of the long-run relationship between Savings and Investments in the OECD economies, 1970-2007

In this paper we test for the existence of a long-run savings-investments relationship in 18 OECD economies over the period 1970-2007. Although individual modelling provides only very weak support to the hypothesis of a link between savings and investments, this cannot be ruled out as individual time series tests may have low power. We thus construct a new bootstrap test for panel cointegration robust to short- and long-run dependence across units. Thid test provides evidence of a long-run savings-investments relationship in about half of the OECD economies examined. The elasticities are however often smaller than 1, the value expected under no capital movements.Savings, Investments, Feldstein-Horioka puzzle, OECD, Panel Cointegration, Stationary Bootstrap.

ICT Capital-Skill Complementarity and Wage Inequality: Evidence from OECD Countries

Although wage inequality has evolved in advanced countries over recent decades, it is unknown the extent to which the evolution of wage inequality is attributable to observed factors such as capital and labor quantities or unobserved factors such as labor-augmenting technology. To examine this issue, we estimate an aggregate production function extended to allow for capital-skill complementarity and factor-biased technological change using cross-country panel data and the shift-share instrument. Our results indicate that most of the changes in the skill premium are attributed to observed factors including ICT equipment in the majority of OECD countries

Revisiting the Old Industrial Region: Adaptation and Adjustment in an Integrating Europe

The position of old industrial regions (OIRs) has been neglected in recent regional development research, partly as a result of dominant discourses concerned with concepts such as the knowledge economy, learning regions and the new regionalism. One outcome of this conceptual overload is that empirical research has typically been confined to all too familiar case studies of regional success that tell a rather partial story. Yet the extension of the European integration project eastwards alongside growing competition from the urban and regional ‘hotspots’ of the global south prompts a series of largely unconsidered questions about the ability of OIRs to achieve sustainable economic development and social cohesion in the years ahead. Lacking the capital, technological and labour assets of more dynamic cities and regions, and with the historic legacy of deindustrialisation and the decline of traditional sectors, OIRs face some important dilemmas of adjustment and adaptation. In this paper our purpose is to engage with these issues through some preliminary empirical research into the recent fortunes of OIRs in Western Europe’s largest economies: France, Germany, Spain and the UK. Drawing upon material from the Eurostat database, our results hint at interesting patterns of divergence in the performance of OIRs in terms of processes of economic restructuring, employment change and social cohesion. In particular some important variations emerge in the trajectory of regions within different national contexts. Drawing upon recent thinking relating to commodity chains and global production networks, our results lead us to pose a series of questions that relate to the way regions are being repositioned within broader political and economic networks as part of unfolding processes of uneven development and changing spatial divisions of labour

Is Poland the Next Spain?

We revisit Western Europe's record with labor-productivity convergence, and tentatively extrapolate its implications for the future path of Eastern Europe. The poorer Western European countries caught up with the richer ones through both higher rates of physical capital accumulation and greater total factor productivity gains. These (relatively) high rates of capital accumulation and TFP growth reflect convergence along two margins. One margin (between industry) is a massive reallocation of labor from agriculture to manufacturing and services, which have higher capital intensity and use resources more efficiently. The other margin (within industry) reflects capital deepening and technology catch-up at the industry level. In Eastern Europe the employment share of agriculture is typically quite large, and agriculture is particularly unproductive. Hence, there are potential gains from sectoral reallocation. However, quantitatively the between-industry component of the East's income gap is quite small. Hence, the East seems to have only one real margin to exploit: the within-industry one. Coupled with the fact that within-industry productivity gaps are enormous, this suggests that convergence will take a long time. On the positive side, however, Eastern Europe already has levels of human capital similar to those of Western Europe. This is good news because human capital gaps have proved very persistent in Western Europe's experience. Hence, Eastern Europe does start out without the handicap that is harder to overcome.

Is Poland the Next Spain?

We revisit Western Europe's record with labor-productivity convergence, and tentatively extrapolate its implications for the future path of Eastern Europe. The poorer Western European countries caught up with the richer ones through both higher rates of physical capital accumulation and greater total factor productivity gains. These (relatively) high rates of capital accumulation and TFP growth reflect convergence along two margins. One margin (between industry) is a massive reallocation of labor from agriculture to manufacturing and services, which have higher capital intensity and use resources more efficiently. The other margin (within industry) reflects capital deepening and technology catchup at the industry level. In Eastern Europe the employment share of agriculture is typically quite large, and agriculture is particularly unproductive. Hence, there are potential gains from sectoral reallocation. However, quantitatively the between-industry component of the East's income gap is quite small. Hence, the East seems to have only one real margin to exploit: the within industry one. Coupled with the fact that within-industry productivity gaps are enormous, this suggests that convergence will take a long time. On the positive side, however, Eastern Europe already has levels of human capital similar to those of Western Europe. This is good news because human capital gaps have proved very persistent in Western Europe's experience. Hence, Eastern Europe does start out without the handicap that is harder to overcome.Economic integration, economic growth, labor, technology, productivity gaps, Europe