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Which Places Grow Faster?

An Empirical Analysis of Employment Growth Factors at the Local Level for the Spanish Economy

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Innovations in Urban and Regional Systems

Abstract

The objective of this work is to study employment growth and its determinants in Spain at a high degree of spatial disaggregation. The impossibility of obtaining GDP data at the local scale makes this a particularly interesting issue, as employment growth can be used as a proxy for local economic growth—and can therefore be expected to provide some insight into the factors associated with local economic performance. Based upon the theories of New Economic Geography (NEG), we first analyse the influence of population size and location on employment growth. As well as considering the Euclidean distance to the main metropolitan areas—the traditional way to control for distance—we also consider the incremental distances, a novel approach that connects this work with the literature on the hierarchy of cities. We also examine the traditional socio-economic growth factors such as education, degree of diversification and sectoral structure. Results show that geographical factors in Spain are especially relevant in the understanding of local employment growth, explaining better than traditional socio-economic characteristics why some areas grow faster. We also examine how different are the patterns of rural and urban areas and introduce spatial auto-regressive models.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Administratively, Spain is divided into 8106 municipalities that, excluding Ceuta and Melilla, are aggregated into 50 provinces (NUTS III level); those 50 provinces are again aggregated into seventeen Autonomous Communities or NUTS II regions of very different population sizes. The number of municipalities also varies widely within each province and ranges from 34 in Las Palmas to 371 municipalities in Burgos.

  2. 2.

    Our intuition is that the educational level effect on overall employment growth might be biased by the effect of the rural LLMs, where having a pool of highly educated labour force does not necessarily imply that the area offers high qualified jobs and/or experiences high rates of employment growth.

  3. 3.

    For a detailed discussion of these complexities, we refer the reader to Anselin (2003) or LeSage and Pace (2009).

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Birmingham, Strategy and International Business City-REDI, Birmingham, UK

    Diana Gutiérrez Posada

  2. Regional Economic Analysis Laboratory–REGIOlab, Applied Economics Department, University of Oviedo, Asturias, Spain

    Fernando Rubiera Morollón & Ana Viñuela

Authors
  1. Diana Gutiérrez Posada
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  2. Fernando Rubiera Morollón
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  3. Ana Viñuela
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Fernando Rubiera Morollón .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Charlotte, NC, USA

    Jean-Claude Thill

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Gutiérrez Posada, D., Rubiera Morollón, F., Viñuela, A. (2020). Which Places Grow Faster?. In: Thill, JC. (eds) Innovations in Urban and Regional Systems. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43694-0_5

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