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The Determinants of Local Employment Growth in Spain

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A Correction to this article was published on 31 May 2018

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Abstract

During the last two decades, the Spanish economy has been growing both in terms of employment and economic activity, and the spatial distribution of both is very uneven. At a high level of disaggregation, when observing figures of local employment growth we find major changes between 1991 and 2001 and 2001–2011 decades. The aim of this paper is to provide a better understanding of the main determinants of local employment growth in Spain, including socio-economic factors as well as the structural characteristics of the area. Using spatial auto-regressive models combined with incremental distances to different population size tiers, we account for the spatial relationship between areas and for the influence of the urban hierarchy. Our spatial units of analysis are Local Labor Markets, since they comprise workers and work places within the same functional region. Our results for Spain confirm how sensitive the empirical analysis is and how the direct and/or indirect effect of some structural and socioeconomic factors over local employment growth may vary along time. The two decades under study reflect two very different patterns of local growth, supporting the idea of designing a la carte local policies, which should be reassessed timely.

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Change history

  • 31 May 2018

    The original version of this article unfortunately contained a mistake. The maps on the right-hand side in Fig. 1 have the wrong titles. NUTS 2 regions should be Local Labour Markets.

Notes

  1. Local labor markets or LLMs are functional regions that internalize the travel-to-work daily movements. The use of this spatial unit will be explained and justified in Section 3.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. REGIOlab – Regional Economics Laboratory, University of Oviedo, Oviedo, Spain

    Diana Gutiérrez Posada, Fernando Rubiera Morollón & Ana Viñuela

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  1. Diana Gutiérrez Posada
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  2. Fernando Rubiera Morollón
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  3. Ana Viñuela
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Correspondence to Fernando Rubiera Morollón.

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Table 5 OLS estimation results
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Gutiérrez Posada, D., Rubiera Morollón, F. & Viñuela, A. The Determinants of Local Employment Growth in Spain. Appl. Spatial Analysis 11, 511–533 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12061-017-9226-6

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