Transport-Regional Equity Issue Revisited

Almeida E. S. de, Haddad E. A. and Hewings G. J. D. Transport-regional equity issue revisited, Regional Studies. The objective of this paper is to analyse the relationship between transport and regional equity in Minas Gerais, Brazil. Furthermore, the existence of a trade-off between economic performance and regional equity is investigated as well. To do so, the paper develops a spatial computable general equilibrium model based on Brocker and Schneider`s approach of 2002 to implement comparative static analysis, explicitly incorporating iceberg transportation costs. Four activities are modelled, namely production, final demand, transportation and exports. Two production factors are assumed: labour and other factors. The model has 12 domestic regions and three external regions. Four counterfactual experiments are developed based on decreases in transportation costs due to a `distance shortening`. The main findings indicate that if the transport infrastructure improvement is focused only among poor regions, the promotion of regional equity is insignificant. If the transport infrastructure improvement links are concentrated among rich regions, there is an increase in regional income inequalities. However, if the improvements are targeted to the roads linking poor regions and rich ones, there is greater promotion of regional equity. The same result will occur when improvements are made to all road links of the state. [image omitted] Almeida E. S. de, Haddad E. A. et Hewings G. J. D. La question du rapport entre le transport et l`equilibre regional vue sous un jour nouveau, Regional Studies. Cet article cherche a analyser le rapport entre le transport et l`equilibre regional en Minas Gerais au Bresil. En outre, on examine la presence d`un echange entre la performance economoique et l`equilibre regional. Pour le faire, on construit un modele geographique de l`equilibre general a utiliser sur ordinateur fonde sur l`approche de Brockner et Schneider en 2002 afin de mettre en oeuvre une analyse statique comparative qui comprend explicitement les frais de transport iceberg. On modelise quatre activites, a savoir, la production, la demande finale, le transport et l`exportation. On fait deux suppositions quant aux facteurs de production: la main-d`oevre et d`autres facteurs. Le modele embrasse douze regions internes et trois regions externes. On fait quatre experiences paradoxales fondees sur la baisse des frais de transport due a une `reduction des distances`. Les principaux resultats indiquent que si l`amelioration de l`equipement de transport ne porte que sur les regions defavorisees, la promotion de l`equilibre regional s`avere negligeable. Si l`amelioration de l`equipement de transport focalise les regions riches, il s`avere un creusement des ecarts des revenus regionaux. Cependant, si les ameliorations ciblent les routes qui relient les regions defavorisees aux regions riches, il s`avere une plus grande promotion de l`equilibre regional. Il en va de meme pour la situation ou on a apporte des amenagements a toutes les liaisons routieres de l`etat. Modele geographique de l`equilibre general a utiliser sur ordinateur Equilibre regional Peformance economique Frais de transport Almeida E. S. de, Haddad E. A. und Hewings G. J. D. Die Wiederaufnahme der Frage von Verkehrswesen im Verhaltnis zu regionaler Fairness, Regional Studies. Dieser Aufsatz beabsichtigt, die Beziehung zwischen Verkehrswesen und regionaler Fairness in Minas Gerais (Brasilien) zu analysieren und zugleich auch das Vorkommen von Einbussen entweder bei wirtschaftlicher Leistung der regionaler Fairness zu untersuchen. Zu diesem Zwecke wird ein auf dem Ansatz von Brocker und Schneider (2002) aufbauendes raumliches komputables allgemeines Gleichgewichtsmodell entwickelt, um vergleichende statistische Analysen durchzufuhren, wobei verborgene `Eisberg`-Transportkosten ausdrucklich berucksichtigt werden. Es werden vier Unternehmenstatigk eiten aufgefuhrt: Herstellung, Nachfrage, Transportwesen und Exporte, und zwei Produktionsfaktoren vorausgesetzt: Arbeitskrafte und andere Faktoren. Das Modell umfasst zwolf Inlandsregionen und drei externe Regionen. Es werden vier gegensatzliche Experimente entwickelt, die auf einer Abnahme der Transportkosten infolge einer `Verkurzung der Entfernungen` beruhen. Die Hauptbefunde weisen darauf hin, dass die Forderung regionaler Fairness unbedeutend bleibt, wenn die Verbesserungen der Transportinfrastruktur sich nur auf minderbemittelte Regionen konzentrieren; werden die Verbesserungen der Verbindungen der Transportinfrastruktur in wohlhabenden Regionen durchgefuhrt, so nehmen regionale Einkommensunterschiede zu. Wenn die Verbesserungen jedoch auf Strassen abzielen, die wohlhabende Regionen mit weniger bemittelten verbinden, wird regionale Fairness starker gefordert. Das gleiche Ergebnis wird sich einstellen, wenn Verbesserungen an allen Strassenverbindungen des Staates vorgenommen werden. Raumliches, komputables, allgemeines Gleichgewichtsmodell Regionale Fairness Wirtschaftsleistung Transportkosten Almeida E. S. de, Haddad E. A. y Hewings G. J. D. Revisando el tema de la igualdad del transporte en las regiones, Regional Studies. El objetivo de este documento es analizar la relacion entre el transporte y la igualdad regional en Minas Gerais, Brasil. Asimismo investigamos la existencia de una compensacion entre el rendimiento economico y la igualdad regional. Para ello desarrollamos un modelo de equilibrio general computable y espacial basado en el enfoque de Brocker y Schneider en 2002 para hacer un analisis estatico y comparativo, explicitamente incorporando los costes ocultos de transporte. Se modelan cuatro actividades: la produccion, la demanda final, el transporte y las exportaciones. Suponemos que existen dos factores de produccion: mano de obra y otros factores. En este modelo, existen doce regiones internas y tres regiones externas. Desarrollamos cuatro experimentos contrafactuales basados en la disminucion de los costes de transporte debido a una `acortamiento de las distancias`. Los principales resultados indican que si la mejora de la infraestructura del transporte se centra solo entre las regiones mas pobres, el fomento de la igualdad regional es insignificante. Si los enlaces de la mejora de la infraestructura del transporte se concentran en las regiones ricas, aumentan las desigualdades de ingresos regionales. Sin embargo, si se mejoran los enlaces de carreteras entre las regiones pobres y ricas, se fomenta mejor la igualdad regional. El mismo resultado ocurre cuando se mejoran los enlaces de todas las carreteras del estado. Modelo de equilibrio general computable y espacial Igualdad regional Rendimiento economico Costes de transporte.

Cohesion policy in the European Union: a brief critical review

Over the past four decades the EU cohesion policy’s focus, objectives and content have experienced significant changes as a result of successive reforms aiming at adapting it to a Union in constant evolution. In the early stages, cohesion policy had eminently redistributive goals and it assumed an explicit spatial dimension. In the late nineties, the possibility of an extension towards Eastern European countries and the limited willingness of net contributors to increase funding led to a turning point in cohesion policy. The increased importance of economic growth and job creation in the 2000’s, within the cohesion policy’s context, has led to a misrepresentation of its essence and motivations. Cohesion was losing importance towards competitiveness and regional equity towards national efficiency. Today, cohesion policy is for many EU countries the main mean for mobilising investment in a context of budgetary constraints and credit rationing. In light of the available evidence, it is likely that the overall design and priorities of the current cohesion policy have a limited impact in terms of convergence in many EU regions, especially in the less developed regions. This paper’s main objectives are to analyse the evolution of European cohesion policy throughout its history, to present a picture of cohesion policy in the 2014-2020 programming period and to discuss the main problems associated with its design, priorities and programming model.

Equity in regional service provision

Most transportation agencies stipulate that an important planning goal is to provide equitable and just public transport services. However, who is to be served and the type of service that should be provided has been ambiguous. This paper develops a methodology for examining equity in the provision of public transportation services. An approach for identifying areas in need of public transport is developed based upon the use of socio-demographic and economic information. Public transport need is then related to levels of access to service. This approach makes it possible to establish the degree to which public transport services may be considered equitable in relation to need and suitable access. A detailed analysis of the southeast Queensland region of Australia illustrates how this approach may be used to inform public transport decision making.

Personal redistribution and the regional allocation of public investment

How should an equity-motivated policy-marker allocate public capital (infrastructure) across regions. Should it aim at reducing interregional differences in per capita output, or at maximizing total output? Such a normative question is examined in a model where the policy-marker is exclusively concerned about personal inequality and has access to two policy instruments. (i) a personal tax-transfer system (taxation is distortionary), and (ii) the regional allocation of public investment. I show that the case for public investment as a significant instrument for interpersonal redistribution is rather weak. In the most favorable case, when the tax code is constrained to be uniform across regions, it is optimal to distort the allocation of public investment in favor of the poor regions, but only to a limited extent. The reason is that poor individuals are relatively more sensitive to public trans fers, which are maximized by allocating public investment efficiently. If! the tax code can vary across regions then the optimal policy may involve an allocation of public investment distorted in favor of the rich regions.

An empirical analysis of wealth taxation: equity Vs.tax compliance

Capital taxation is currently under debate, basically due to problems of administrative control and proper assessment of the levied assets. We analyze both problems focusing on a capital tax, the annual wealth tax (WT), which is only applied in five OECD countries, being Spain one of them. We concentrate our analysis on top 1% adult population, which permits us to describe the evolution of wealth concentration in Spain along 1983-2001. On average top 1% holds about 18% of total wealth, which rises to 19% when tax incompliance and under-assessment is corrected for housing, the main asset. The evolution suggests wealth concentration has risen. Regarding WT, we analyze whether it helps to reduce wealth inequality or, on the contrary, it reinforces vertical inequity (due to especial concessions) and horizontal inequity (due to the de iure and to de facto different treatment of assets). We analyze in detail housing and equity shares. By means of a time series analysis, we relate the reported values with reasonable price indicators and proxies of the propensity to save. We infer net tax compliance is extremely low, which includes both what we commonly understand by (gross) tax compliance and the degree of under-assessment due to fiscal legislation (for housing). That is especially true for housing, whose level of net tax compliance is well below 50%. Hence, we corroborate the difficulties in taxing capital, and so cast doubts on the current role of the WT in Spain in reducing wealth inequality.

Clarifying approaches to: health needs assessment, health impact assessment, integrated impact assessment, health equity audit, and race equality impact assessment

Planners, policy makers and practitioners across all sectors in England use a range of approaches to assess health needs, inform decisions and assess impact. Use of these approaches can lead to improved health outcomes and reduced inequalities through auditing provision, access and outcomes. Five main approaches are used by local, regional and national government, voluntary agencies and the NHS: ۢ Health needs assessment (HNA) ۢ Health impact assessment (HIA) ۢ Integrated impact assessment (IIA) ۢ Health equity audit (HEA) ۢ Race equality impact assessment (REIA)

Radial measures of public services deficit for regional allocation of public funds

The goal of this paper is to present an optimal resource allocation model for the regional allocation of public service inputs. Theproposed solution leads to maximise the relative public service availability in regions located below the best availability frontier, subject to exogenous budget restrictions and equality ofaccess for equal need criteria (equity-based notion of regional needs). The construction of non-parametric deficit indicators is proposed for public service availability by a novel application of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) models, whose results offer advantages for the evaluation and improvement of decentralised public resource allocation systems. The method introduced in this paper has relevance as a resource allocation guide for the majority of services centrally funded by the public sector in a given country, such as health care, basic and higher education, citizen safety, justice, transportation, environmental protection, leisure, culture, housing and city planning, etc.

The regional distribution of unemployment. What do micro-data tell us?

Regional disparities in unemployment rates are large and persistent. The literature provides evidence of their magnitude and evolution, as well as evidence of the role of certain economic, demographic and environmental factors in explaining the gap between regions of low and high unemployment. Most of these studies, however, adopt an aggregate approach and so do not account for the individual characteristics of the unemployed and employed in each region. This paper, by drawing on micro-data from the Spanish wave of the Labour Force Survey, seeks to remedy this shortcoming by analysing regional differentials in unemployment rates. An appropriate decomposition of the regional gap in the average probability of being unemployed enables us to distinguish between the contribution of differences in the regional distribution of individual characteristics from that attributable to a different impact of these characteristics on the probability of unemployment. Our results suggest that the well-documented disparities in regional unemployment are not just the result of regional heterogeneity in the distribution of individual characteristics. Non-negligible differences in the probability of unemployment remain after controlling for this type of heterogeneity, as a result of differences across regions in the impact of the observed characteristics. Among the factors considered in our analysis, regional differences in the endowment and impact of an individual’s education are shown to play a major role.

Regional heterogeneity in wage distributions. Evidence from Spain.

Regional differences in real wages have been shown to be both large and persistent in the U.S. and the U.K., as well as in the economies of other countries. Empirical evidence suggests that wage differentials adjusted for the cost of living cannot only be explained by the unequal spatial distribution of characteristics determining earnings. Rather, average wage gap decomposition reveals the important contribution made by regional heterogeneity in the price assigned to these characteristics. This paper proposes a method for assessing regional disparities in the entire wage distribution and for decomposing the effect of differences across regions in the endowments and prices of the characteristics. The hypothesis forwarded is that the results from previous studies obtained by comparing average regional wages may be partial and nonrobust. Empirical evidence from a matched employer-employee dataset for Spain confirms marked differences in wage distributions between regions, which do not result from worker and firm characteristics but from the increasing role of regional differences in the return to human capital.

Human Capital and Regional Wage Gaps

This paper uses micro-level data to analyse the effect of human capital on regional wage differentials. The results for the set of Spanish regions confirm that they differ in the endowment of human capital, but also that the return that individuals obtain from it varies sharply across regions. Regional heterogeneity in returns is especially intense in the case of education, particularly when considering its effect on the employability of individuals. These differences in endowment and, especially, in returns to human capital, account for a significant proportion of regional wage gaps.

Conceptualizing change in the Portuguese footwear industry: regional voices and cognitive spaces of agency

Expanding national services sectors and global competition aggravate current and perceived future market pressures on traditional manufacturing industries. These perceptions of change have provoked a growing intensification of geo-political discourses on technological innovation and ‘learning’, and calls for competency in design among other professional skills. However, these political discourses on innovation and learning have paralleled public concerns with the apparent ‘growth pains’ from factory closures and subsequent increases in unemployment, and its debilitating social and economic implications for local and regional development. In this respect the following investigation sets out to conceptualize change through the complementary and differing perceptions of industry and regional actors’ experiences or narratives, linking these perceptions to their structure-determined spheres of agent-environment interactivity. It aims to determine whether agents’ differing perceptions of industry transformation can have a role in the legitimization of their interests in, and in sustaining their organizational influence over the process of industry-regional transformation. It argues that industry and regional agent perceptions are among the cognitive aspects of agent-environment interactivity that permeate agency. It stresses agents’ ability to reason and manipulate their work environments to preserve their self-regulating interests in, and task representative influence over the multi-jurisdictional space of industry-regional transformation. The contributions of this investigation suggest that agents’ varied perceptions of industry and regional change inform or compete for influence over the redirection of regional, industry and business strategies. This claim offers a greater appreciation for the reflexive and complex institutional dimensions of industry planning and development, and the political responsibility to socially just forms of regional development. It positions the outcomes of this investigation at the nexus of intensifying geo-political discourses on the efficiency and equity of territorial development in Europe.

Tributação de energia elétrica e bem-estar social: uma análise regional

Os reflexos da tributação sobre o setor elétrico ultrapassam as questões meramente arrecadatórias de estados, municípios e União, envolvem toda a produção do país e o bem-estar de sua população. Neste contexto, e com o intuito de trazer as questões de eficiência e redistributividade ao ambiente de tributação de energia elétrica, o presente trabalho pretende apresentar um panorama da tributação atual do consumo residencial de energia elétrica, principalmente em relação ao ICMS, juntamente com um cálculo simplificado de alíquotas considerando dois modelos de tributação ótima, estabelecidos por F. R. Ramsey e Diamond e Mirrlees, a partir dos quais é possível realizar comparações em relação ao modelo atual e sintetizar uma visão nacional de uma tributação realizada em sua maior parte regionalmente. O primeiro modelo considera apenas eficiência na definição das alíquotas aplicadas aos produtos, partindo da premissa de que todos os consumidores são idênticos e não há preocupações com equidade. As elasticidades necessárias para aplicação do critério de Ramsey são estimadas a partir de dados em painel das 64 distribuidoras de energia elétrica do país, utilizando um modelo em dois estágios com variável instrumental. O segundo modelo, proposto por Diamond e Mirrlees, incorpora a equidade na modelagem, introduzindo a diferenciação entre os indivíduos.