Liberalisation and de-regulation of the public sector in the transition from plan to market

The above analysis allows several conclusions to be drawn:

Productivity effects of environmental performance: evidence from TFP analysis on marketing cooperatives

The object of the present article is to offer a decomposition of productivity indices incorporating environmental changes. The model followed is an input oriented approach related to undesirable output (environmental performance attribute) in horticultural marketing cooperatives. This study is motivated by both the lack of analysis of environmental performance's effects on agribusiness productivity and the relevance of cooperative firms in the European agricultural model for attaining sustainability. For this purpose, bootstrapped envelopment analysis is applied and the best practice frontier obtained corresponds to decision making units showing the best environmental behaviour. The Malmquist total factor productivity (TFP) is decomposed into technological change, efficiency and environmental change. In the second stage, the correlations of these changes with other management variables of cooperatives are analysed. The indicators obtained, on one hand, advice about the nonseparable distance function estimations when the environmental factor is introduced. On the other hand, the results display a relevant increase in efficiency and environmental components for the period under study showing a high influence from labour qualification, environmental effort and spillover effect in the sector.     

Interest rates,expectations and the credibility of the Bank of Spain

The purpose of the paper is to pinpoint the date of the change of monetary policy regime which occurred in Spain during the year 1984, when it moved away from controlling monetary aggregates towards interest rate targeting. The most likely date for the change is estimated and, surprisingly, there is evidence that agents learned about the new intermediate target quite rapidly.A week after the change, the term structure of interest rates showed how market agents attributed much more informational content to interest rate changes than they had previously. Two types of transitions are tried: a one-step and a gradual logistic swithing function.     

Ugo Broggi: a precursor in mathematical economics

The concern for the existence of solution to the Walras - Cassel model is usually dated at the beginning of the 1930s, and one decade later the proof of existence of utility function. Ugo Broggi, however, posed both issues in 1923 and 1919, respectively, and even hinted at modern ways of solving them. He was an outstanding mathematician, a former disciple of David Hilbert and collaborator with the Giornale degli Economisti. Broggi's achievements are also linked to a critical reading of Osorio's treatise on Paretian economics.     

Gender and regional inequality in human development: the case of Spain1

In this paper, we present estimates of the Human Development Index and the Gender-Related Development Index in the Autonomous Communities of Spain. Our case study of Spain, a developed country with clear gender and regional differences, demonstrates the importance of adjusting human development indices in accordance with gender discrimination and regional inequalities. We also show the significance of the income component in assessing the development level of women in countries like Spain, where lack of employment or low remuneration are the chief characteristics of women's inequality. Our analysis makes clear that the Gender-Related Human Development Index has limited applicability in developed countries; it also illustrates the need for alternative variables or models to assess inequality in those countries.     

Race and Income Distribution: Evidence from the USA,Brazil and South Africa

The aim of this paper is to provide some empirical evidence about black–white differentials in the distribution of income and wellbeing in three different countries: Brazil, the USA and South Africa. In all cases, people of African descent are in a variety of ways socially disadvantaged compared with the relatively more affluent whites. We investigate the extent of these gaps in comparative perspective, and analyze to what degree they are associated with differences in the observed characteristics of races, such as where they live, the types of household they have, or their performance in the labor market. We undertake this analysis with the Oaxaca–Blinder decomposition at the means and with a propensity score approach at the entire distribution. Our results show how the factors underlying the racial divide vary across countries and income quantiles.     

Offshoring and employment structure in the EU periphery: the case of Spain

The effects of offshoring of production have received a great deal of interest due to their implications on labour markets. However, the main theoretical predictions related to this issue are not always fulfilled in the empirical analysis; according to the Stolper–Samuelson theorem, there seems to be unanimous support for its effects in advanced countries whose production is relocated but not at all for recipient economies of the same. Additionally, there is a lack of empirical evidence in countries specialized in unskilled-labour tasks which are, at the same time, economies with higher relative wages in a global framework such as the Spanish economy. In this sense, the aim of this article is to analyse the effects of material offshoring in the relative composition of employment in the Spanish manufacturing industry during the period 1990–2007. Furthermore, we investigate the effects of immigrant labour and the temporary employment rate due to its increasing relevance in the Spanish economy during the period analysed. Using a generalized methods of moments (GMM) approach, our results suggest that, as opposed to most developed countries, offshoring in Spain has favoured the demand for blue-collar workers. In addition, we confirm that the increase in immigration and the increasing use of temporary contracts have enlarged the share of low-skilled workers.     

Easing the assessment of emerging technologies in technology observatories. Findings about patterns of dissemination of emerging technologies on the internet

This paper considers the Web as a big data container that can be used by Technology Observatories and administrations to track emerging issues and more specifically emerging technologies. It considers information that is available on the Internet for free from different sources, and proposes a framework that can be useful to characterise them and to detect patterns of dissemination. This framework is made up of 30 metrics obtained from different kinds of sources (general web, patents, scholars?…). Some of them are obtained directly as the number of hits retrieved by queries on a search engine, and other ones calculated by means of ratios. This paper contains the development of a complete case that utilises this framework to characterise emerging technologies included in the well-known Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, in this case the 2015 release¹ and to analyze patterns of dissemination of these technologies on the Internet.     

Unfolding Patterns of Unpaid Household Work in Latin America

Although Colombia, Mexico, Peru, and Uruguay show similar empirical patterns in terms of time women devote to unpaid work, they also present important variations in how unpaid work is distributed between men and women. Using time-use surveys for the 2007–10 period, this study finds a uniform pattern across the four countries regarding the main individual-level variables related to the allocation of unpaid work. When decomposing the gender gap in hours devoted to unpaid work, most of the difference cannot be attributed to variations in observable characteristics of men and women: the unexplained part of the gap is the dominant part. Results suggest that both the strength of traditional gender roles and existing welfare architecture are relevant factors in understanding variations in how unpaid work is distributed between men and women in these four countries. The results reaffirm that powerful interventions are needed to shift gender norms about unpaid work.     

Economic mobility along the business cycle. The case of Peru

The performance of Latin American countries in reducing poverty and expanding the middle class has been remarkable. By taking a close look at the Peruvian experience, we examine how this aggregate behavior relates to business cycle conditions and whether different population groups share this behavior. We find that social mobility is cyclical; it decreases in recessions but increases with strong economic growth. The reduction in poverty in Peru appears to be the result of a sustained increase in the poverty exit rate together with a prolonged decrease in the poverty entry rate. These results hold among heterogeneous groups and are particularly marked for households regarded as initially disadvantaged.