The beach as a strategic element of governance for Spanish coastal towns

Governance models and future strategic visions for Spain's beach social–ecological systems are assessed using an online questionnaire. Beaches continue to represent the most valuable attraction for Spanish coastal towns, but their strategic vision regarding the beach consists more of it being a profitable attraction and of maintaining the traditional “sun and sand” model, rather than of planning strategically. There are three trends looking to 2020. First, beach resorts are becoming linked with culture and heritage, gastronomy, events and ecotourism to enhance their attraction capacity and competitiveness. Second, the coastal towns plan to reduce the strain on beaches by increasing the number of square metres of sand per user. Third, they plan to reduce the strain of the seasonal population compared to the year-round population. Two indices (Beach Quality and Governance Quality) and two factors (Beach Management Proximity and Tourist Resource Expectations) were developed to assess municipal beach governance frameworks, enabling us to construct a typology of four municipal governance models. The country follows a classical public hierarchical model of beach management. Other than at the local scale, beaches are not strategically managed. There is a lack of implementation of adaptive measures, collective actions, integrated management, or policy learning.     

Sustainable tourism indicators: selection criteria for policy implementation and scientific recognition

The use of sustainable tourism indicators (STI) raises several issues, mainly because of the multiple interpretations of the concept of sustainable development, and by extension of the concept of sustainable tourism. It also brings to light incompatibilities between the needs and objectives of academics and policy-makers in developing a set of STI. The STI are then either scientifically relevant but too complex to be operational, or else they result from a political consensus, which could lead to conflicts of interest, such as in the destination branding strategy. In this paper, we argue that the trade-off between academic and policy-maker approaches to indicator development can be achieved through the development of core STI, based on the application of two sets of selection criteria to 507 expert-recognized indicators. The first set of criteria allows us to select 20 core STI, while the second set of criteria aims to match the selected indicators with a destination's policy framework in order to guarantee their usability. We illustrate the selection procedure using the Gaspésie region in Québec as a case study.     

The innovation–trade nexus: Italy in historical perspective (1861–1939)

This work investigates the relationship between trade and technological specialisation in Italy, during the long time span ranging from Unification to the eve of the Second World War. To do this, new series of Italy’s indices of specialisation in trade and technology are calculated based on official data. Empirical analysis, based on Spearman rank correlation coefficients and fixed-effects regression, shows the emergence of a positive relationship between specialisation in technology and specialisation in trade after the start of the country’s modern economic growth, around the turn of the twentieth century. This, however, was uniquely driven by a negative relationship between technological specialisation and import shares, while no significant relationship between the former and export shares emerges. Furthermore, this finding excludes the most important sector, leading Italian industrialisation, that is, textiles, the outstanding performance of which can be seen as largely determined by its being particularly suited to the country’s factor endowment.     

The Theory and Practice of Regulation with Multinational Enterprises

The ability of firms to operate in several markets at the same time is changing regulators' tasks. Regulatory bodies are now having to deal with multinational firms which spread their business activities all over the world. This paper analyzes the theory and practice of regulation in terms of the multinational dimensions of regulated firms. We show that the perceived theory of regulation is indeed affected, and that new issues arise both from a positive and normative point of view.     

Aggregation of exponential smoothing processes with an application to portfolio risk evaluation

In this paper we propose a unified framework to analyse contemporaneous and temporal aggregation of a widely employed class of integrated moving average (IMA) models. We obtain a closed-form representation for the parameters of the contemporaneously and temporally aggregated process as a function of the parameters of the original one. These results are useful due to the close analogy between the integrated GARCH (1, 1) model for conditional volatility and the IMA (1, 1) model for squared returns, which share the same autocorrelation function. In this framework, we present an application dealing with Value-at-Risk (VaR) prediction at different sampling frequencies for an equally weighted portfolio composed of multiple indices. We apply the aggregation results by inferring the aggregate parameter in the portfolio volatility equation from the estimated vector IMA (1, 1) model of squared returns. Empirical results show that VaR predictions delivered using this suggested approach are at least as accurate as those obtained by applying standard univariate methodologies, such as RiskMetrics.     

Modelling systemic price cojumps with Hawkes factor models

Instabilities in the price dynamics of a large number of financial assets are a clear sign of systemic events. By investigating portfolios of highly liquid stocks, we find that there are a large number of high-frequency cojumps. We show that the dynamics of these jumps is described neither by a multivariate Poisson nor by a multivariate Hawkes model. We introduce a Hawkes one-factor model which is able to capture simultaneously the time clustering of jumps and the high synchronization of jumps across assets.     

Export restraints in a model of trade with capital accumulation

This paper examines the impact of voluntary export restraints (VERs) in an international duopoly modeled as a differential game. With a Ramsey capital accumulation dynamics, the game admits multiple steady states, and a VER cannot be ‘voluntarily’ employed by the foreign firm in case of Cournot behavior in demand substitutes. Hence, the dynamic framework confirms the results of the VERs literature with static interaction in output levels. In the case of price behavior, the adoption of an export restraint may increase the profits of both firms if products are substitutes and the steady state is ‘market-driven’. However, contrary to the acquired wisdom based upon the static approach, the dynamic analysis also admits an equilibrium outcome, identified by the Ramsey golden rule, where the incentive to adopt a VER is ruled out, irrespective of whether firms are quantity- or price-setters.     

The environmental,social and economic effects of recent technological changes in sugarcane on the State of São Paulo,Brazil

From 2007 to 2017, the Agro‐Environmental Protocol of the Sugar and Energy Sector was in force, an agreement between sugarcane mill owners and the State Government of São Paulo, Brazil, proposing to eliminate sugarcane burning as a method to facilitate the harvest. Simultaneously, the sugarcane harvest was becoming widely mechanized while, under the interests of capital accumulation, the mills were entering the information and communication technology era and providing the agricultural processes with more precise and immediate management and technological controls, similar to those implemented in the mills' administrative and industrial operations in the 1990s. Short‐term factors, including environmental factors, favoured sugarcane technological changes. As a result, there was a mass layoff of rural workers and an increasing number of people/workers in agricultural mechanization, transportation and maintenance of machinery and administrative as well. The whole process highlighted the differences between mills, resulting in small and medium sugarcane farmers and mills to become the most impacted, in operational and financial terms, by the accelerating mechanization of the sugarcane industry as a whole.     

Trust and foreign ownership: Evidence from intra‐European foreign direct investments

We use a novel firm‐level dataset to test whether trust affects the volume and the ownership structure FDI across Europe. Our methodology deals with the endogeneity of trust from the investor to the recipient country. We expect such a trust measure to affect investment decisions, and the associated knowledge capital, differently across types of foreign investors. In particular, this effect is expected to be stronger for industrial investors who possess transferable knowledge capital. The data confirm our predictions. Higher trust increases the number and volume of FDIs, but also the probability of co‐investing with a partner from the recipient country.     

Conditionally heteroscedastic unobserved component models and their reduced form

The reduced form of the local level model with conditionally heteroscedastic GARCH(1,1) noises is analyzed. We show that the IMA-GARCH model is a good alternative but its conditional heteroscedasticity is weaker than this of the unobserved disturbances.