Identification of the local productive systems in Spain: a new approach

Paper submitted to the 44th European Congress of the European Regional Science Association, Porto, 25-29 August 2004.

Participación y satisfacción del ciudadano en la gestión pública: un estudio en el ámbito de la administración local

En el presente trabajo se analizan las relaciones entre participación y satisfacción de los ciudadanos en el ámbito de las administraciones locales españolas, también estudiaremos la relación entre el tamaño organizacional y los niveles de participación y satisfacción. Para ello analizaremos los resultados de una encuesta a la que respondieron 388 responsables de Recursos Humanos de los mayores ayuntamientos españoles. La fundamentación de este trabajo parte del cambio de paradigma que se ha dado en los últimos años en el ámbito de la gestión pública hacia el New Public Management o Nueva Gestión Pública. Este paradigma supone, entre otras cosas, una nueva forma de relación de las administraciones públicas con los ciudadanos, en la cuál el papel pasivo del mismo, como receptor de servicios en una situación de subordinación, pase a un papel más activo, en una situación de mayor igualdad. En este sentido se reclama una mayor participación de los ciudadanos en las decisiones públicas y que se presten unos servicios públicos que satisfagan las necesidades de los ciudadanos.

Innovation in public services: the case of Spanish local government

The present paper aims to determine the level of implementation of innovations in Spanish local government as well as to identify which types of innovations are most common. The paper also considers the link between innovative behavior and organizational size. However, since innovations cannot occur as isolated phenomena but rather as a part of corporate strategy, the study compares the innovative behavior of the local governments analyzed with their typologies or strategic profiles. In order to achieve the aforementioned aims, the paper uses a survey of the Human Resource Managers of Town Halls in the largest Spanish municipalities. The results of this survey show that the most frequent innovations in the local governments analyzed are collaborative; the largest town halls show more propensities to innovate and they focus on external relationships which are collaborative and on the basis on Information and Communication Technologies. The study reconfirms that town halls with a prospective profile are the most innovative.

Local probe of fractional edge states of S=1 Heisenberg spin chains

Spin chains are among the simplest physical systems in which electron-electron interactions induce novel states of matter. Here we propose to combine atomic scale engineering and spectroscopic capabilities of state of the art scanning tunnel microscopy to probe the fractionalized edge states of individual atomic scale S=1 spin chains. These edge states arise from the topological order of the ground state in the Haldane phase. We also show that the Haldane gap and the spin-spin correlation length can be measured with the same technique.

Implementation of non-local boundary layer schemes in the Regional Atmospheric Modeling System and its impact on simulated mesoscale circulations

This paper proposes the implementation of different non-local Planetary Boundary Layer schemes within the Regional Atmospheric Modeling System (RAMS) model. The two selected PBL parameterizations are the Medium-Range Forecast (MRF) PBL and its updated version, known as the Yonsei University (YSU) PBL. YSU is a first-order scheme that uses non-local eddy diffusivity coefficients to compute turbulent fluxes. It is based on the MRF, and improves it with an explicit treatment of the entrainment. With the aim of evaluating the RAMS results for these PBL parameterizations, a series of numerical simulations have been performed and contrasted with the results obtained using the Mellor and Yamada (MY) scheme, also widely used, and the standard PBL scheme in the RAMS model. The numerical study carried out here is focused on mesoscale circulation events during the summer, as these meteorological situations dominate this season of the year in the Western Mediterranean coast. In addition, the sensitivity of these PBL parameterizations to the initial soil moisture content is also evaluated. The results show a warmer and moister PBL for the YSU scheme compared to both MRF and MY. The model presents as well a tendency to overestimate the observed temperature and to underestimate the observed humidity, considering all PBL schemes and a low initial soil moisture content. In addition, the bias between the model and the observations is significantly reduced moistening the initial soil moisture of the corresponding run. Thus, varying this parameter has a positive effect and improves the simulated results in relation to the observations. However, there is still a significant overestimation of the wind speed over flatter terrain, independently of the PBL scheme and the initial soil moisture used, even though a different degree of accuracy is reproduced by RAMS taking into account the different sensitivity tests.