Flexible employment and cross- regional adjustment

Employment flexibility is commonly associated to greater labour mobility and thus faster cross-regional adjustments. The literature however offers very little hard evidence on this and quite limited theoretical guidance. This paper examines empirically the relationship between employment flexibility and cross-regional adjustment (migration) at the regional and local levels in the UK. Employment flexibility is associated to higher labour mobility (but only at a rather localised scale) and at the same time seems to reduce the responsiveness of migration to unemployment. This suggest that rising flexibility may be linked to higher persistence in spatial disparities, as intra-regional adjustments are strengthened while extraregional adjustments weakened. Keywords: Employment flexibility, regional migration, labour market adjustment JEL Codes: R11, R23, J08, J61

Construcción de un modelo Multi- Regional Input-Output (MRIO) medioambiental para Cataluña y el resto de España: Estudio del balance en CO2 incorporado en el comercio

El objetivo de este estudio es analizar el impacto, en emisiones de CO2, de la demanda final de Cataluña en relación a los vínculos comerciales interregionales con el resto de España y el resto del mundo. Este proceso implica el análisis del balance en CO2 incorporado para Cataluña, lo que permitirá evaluar la responsabilidad de la economía catalana respecto a estas emisiones. Para este propósito se construye, para esta determinada desagregación regional, un modelo Multi-Regional Input-Output (MRIO) extendido al medioambiente con sectores verticalmente integrados. La incorporación de la técnica de la integración vertical nos permite un enfoque alternativo para el Balance Neto y un análisis más detallado de los vínculos interregionales entre los diversos sectores productivos, centrado en la responsabilidad última de la demanda final de cada sector en cada región. Hasta el momento, los estudios previos sobre los impactos medioambientales incorporados al comercio español se han centrado principalmente en el ámbito nacional. No obstante, por un lado el comercio interregional con el resto de España en términos monetarios representa cerca de la mitad del comercio exterior catalán. Por otro lado, los distintos metabolismos energéticos de ambas economías tienen como consecuencia una importante diferencia en la intensidad de emisión en la producción de bienes y servicios. Esta situación genera para Cataluña un déficit en el Balance Neto estimado con el resto de España, aún teniendo un importante superávit monetario. De esto se desprende la importancia de integrar el nivel interregional en los estudios de los impactos medioambientales incorporados en el comercio y, en consecuencia, en la planificación y formalización de políticas económicas y ambientales a nivel nacional.

What about people in European Regional Science?

The 51st ERSA Conference held in Barcelona in 2011 was one of the largest ever. Here, by examining the characteristics of the conference, this paper identifies the main trends in Regional Science at a moment in which the discipline is renewing its efforts to provide responses in a complex, globalised world in which cities and regions are acquiring greater and greater importance. This paper follows in the tradition of a long list of studies that have examined the nature of the field of Regional Science and draws on a broad array of sources of information: the delegates’ demographic details, the conference program itself, a satisfaction survey conducted among delegates, a quality survey addressed to those chairing the sessions and, finally, a bibliometric database including each author signing a paper presented at the conference. With this information we describe the ERSA delegates: their relative youthfulness; the areas in which women are taking on a more important role; the countries and regions of the world that have the most dominant profile in Regional Science today; the thematic areas that are being driven by professionals as opposed to academics; the relevance of regional economic growth and innovation as trending topics in the field; the growing frequency of co-authorship and, consequently, of scientific collaboration; and, finally, and perhaps most importantly, the continuous enhancement of the quality of the work being undertaken in the discipline. Indeed, following on from this description, the results of the regression analysis conducted show that for ERSA delegates what matters most is quality, and this must be the direction that future conferences should move toward. Ultimately, therefore, ERSA conferences are comprehensive, all-embracing occasions, representing an ideal opportunity for regional scientists to present their work to each other and to network.

El nuevo sistema de financiación regional: Adenda

This note contains some addenda to a recent paper (de la Fuente, 2010) that analyzed the new Spanish system of regional financing and estimated its financial results for 2009. The note updates my previous estimates using the information contained in the recently published liquidation of the system for 2009. It also discusses some aspects of the new financing law that have to do with the future evolution of the system and collects some data that may be useful to project its results.