Carlos Llano

Opening the interregional trade "Black Box": The c-intereg database for the Spanish economy (1995-2005)

Recent literature on border effect has demonstrated that national trade (intra- as well as interregional trade) tends to be more intense than international trade. Unfortunately, owing to the dearth of information on interregional economic relations, this important aspect of the economy has remained relatively ignored. In this article, the authors have described the methodology and main results of the largest estimation of Spanish interregional trade (1995—2005) carried out as a part of the C-Intereg project. The results obtained highlight the importance of the internal trade and the validity of the gravity model. Although the estimation focuses on the Spanish economy, the methodology can easily be applied to other European Union (EU) countries. In the upcoming years, this innovative database will be further developed in all its dimensions (space, time, and sectors) to serve as a promising framework for the application of different techniques such as spatial interaction models or interregional input—output approaches.

A Spatial Interaction Model With Spatially Structured Origin and Destination Effects

We introduce a Bayesian hierarchical regression model that extends the traditional least-squares regression model used to estimate gravity or spatial interaction relations involving origin-destination flows. Spatial interaction models attempt to explain variation in flows from n origin regions to n destination regions resulting in a sample of N=n^2 observations that reflect an n by n flow matrix converted to a vector. Explanatory variables typically include origin and destination characteristics as well as distance between each region and all other regions. Our extension introduces latent spatial effects parameters structured to follow a spatial autoregressive process. Individual effects parameters are included in the model to reflect latent or unobservable influences at work that are unique to each region treated as an origin and destination. That is, we estimate

Social networks and trade of services: modelling interregional flows with spatial and network autocorrelation effects

2n

Commuting Times: Is There Any Penalty for Immigrants?

individual effects parameters using the sample of N=n^2 observations. We illustrate the method using a sample of commodity flows between 18 Spanish regions during the 2002 period.

The Border Effect and the Nonlinear Relationship between Trade and Distance

Recent literature on border effect has fostered research on informal barriers to trade and the role played by network dependencies. In relation to social networks, it has been shown that intensity of trade in goods is positively correlated with migration flows between pairs of countries/regions. In this article, we investigate whether such a relation also holds for interregional trade of services. We also consider whether interregional trade flows in services linked with tourism exhibit spatial and/or social network dependence. Conventional empirical gravity models assume the magnitude of bilateral flows between regions is independent of flows to/from regions located nearby in space, or flows to/from regions related through social/cultural/ethic network connections. With this aim, we provide estimates from a set of gravity models showing evidence of statistically significant spatial and network (demographic) dependence in the bilateral flows of the trade of services considered. The analysis has been applied to the Spanish intra- and interregional monetary flows of services from the accommodation, restaurants and travel agencies for the period 2000–2009, using alternative datasets for the migration stocks and definitions of network effects.

Rethinking Regional Competitiveness: Catalonia's International and Interregional Trade 1995-2006

The assimilation of immigrants and their impact on the labour market of the host country have become a growing subject of study in recent literature. This is a topic of particular interest in countries like Spain, where immigration has become one of the main challenges of government policy in recent years. The Madrid region has experienced one of the highest increases in the number of foreign residents between 1996 and 2007. The intensity of this inflow in such a short period of time has led to restrictions on the ability of the residential and labour market to absorb all these newcomers, limiting their choice set of available dwellings and jobs. In this paper the spatial mismatch hypothesis for the Madrid region is tested by exploring the relationship between immigrants’ residential location and employment accessibility as measured by commuting times. The findings reveal that immigrants from eastern Europe, Africa, Ecuador and Colombia are significantly more likely to experience higher commuting times when compared with natives. These differences in commuting times can be attributed to different preferences regarding dwelling and employment optimal decisions. However, they could also be seen as symptoms of residential segregation and the difficulties in employment accessibility experienced by immigrant groups.

Intranational Home Bias in the Presence of Wholesalers, Hub-spoke Structures and Multimodal Transport Deliveries

The border-effect literature confirms that sub-national units tend to trade more with the rest of their country than with foreign markets. However, it is likely that ongoing processes of trade integration will generate a trade-off between internal and external integration for sub-national units within countries. In this paper we estimate the internal and external border effect, using a novel dataset that captures intra- and international shipments between Spanish regions and regions in eight European countries with alternative treatments of the nonlinear relationship between distance and trade.

Cities export specialization

Studies of competitiveness tend to focus on a local economys global interactions, particularly its international trade. But for countries that are at least mid-sized (such as Spain), interregional trade tends to be as large as or significantly larger than international trade. The case of Catalonia illustrates the importance of interregional flows in truly analyzing and devising strategies for a regions external competitiveness. Accounting for interregional trade changes and performing analyses of Catalonias overall merchandise trade balance, which sectors generate external surpluses as opposed to deficits, and who Catalonias key trading partners are, and the use of a gravity-model approach to estimate external border effects at the regional level for Catalonia and the rest of Spain, reveal significant variations by sector and by trading partner, generally higher external border effects for exports than imports, and declines in border effects over time - but with a discernible flattening in recent years.

Testing Transport Mode Cooperation and Competition Within a Country: A Spatial Econometrics Approach

Abstract When modelling interregional flows it is standard to identify the origin and destination of a flow with the point of production and consumption. However, the presence of hub-spoke structures or multimodal flows may introduce bias, such as being an additional source for cross-sectional correlation between dyadic flows. The aim of this paper is to model inter-provincial flows within a country (Spain) considering this potential bias using a novel dataset with 50 inter-provincial flows and four transport modes. We then feed this dataset into various specifications of a gravity model that incorporates cross-sectional dependence attributable to hub-spoke structures.

Modeling the Effect of Social-Network on Interregional Trade of Services: How Sensitive Are the Results to Alternative Measures of Social Linkages

ABSTRACT We analyse whether more populated cities have an export specialization different from the one of less populated cities. Using very detailed product-level export data for Brazilian urban areas over the period 2000–2013, we show that more populated cities export proportionately more skill-intensive and complex goods than less populated cities. This result is consistent with the larger diversity of skills and the higher share of skilled workers in more populated cities.