Ilyes Boumahdi (p), Nouzha Zaoujal

John Gibson

In order to raise the objective perception that the Moroccan population can make towards Europe, Morocco's main partner, we have constructed a Synthetic Index of Social Wellbeing (SISWB) aggregating, by the minmax method, six indicators covering the dimensions of health, living conditions and gender. SISWB covers the 93 regions of Morocco and 34 European countries between 2000 and 2019.
We have noted center-periphery disparities, in particular between the Nordic regions (In particular the Norwegian and Finnish capital regions Helsinki-Uusimaa in addition to the Swedish region Central Norrland) as well as the central German-speaking regions (In particular the Austrian Bundesland of the capital Vienna, the German Länder of the capital Berlin and Hamburg and the Swiss region of Northwestern Switzerland made up of the three German-speaking cantons of Basel-Stadt, Basel-Landschaft and Aargau) and the rest of Europe. Moroccan regions have the lowest SISWB scores in the same way as some of the countries of South-Eastern Europe, notably Turkey and Greece, and those of the countries concerned by the last enlargement of the EU in 2004, in particular, the Slovak Republic, Hungary and Slovenia.
Thus, we found that the distributions of social wellbeing are subject to significant spatial heterogeneity with a Moran's index of 0.84. Also, we checked the absolute β-convergence of the regions by a spatially autocorrelated error model (SEM). Thus, the effect of spatial diffusion of the domains of social well-being is linked to exogenous variables not taken into account in our specification. The speed of convergence is +0.9% per year, i.e. a convergence period of 83 years for the regions to reduce half of the gap which separates them from their stationary states. Thus, the weaker movement of the less advanced regions on the path of catching up with the more advanced regions partly explains the more exacerbated tensions at this level in the peripheral regions. This suggests more particular attention from non-advanced countries in terms of national public actions in favor of social cohesion at the territorial level.
The conceptual framework of social well-being serves as a basis for diagnosis, programming and prioritization of local development projects in Morocco. A possible extension of this work in the event of the publication of finer harmonized data would be to analyze local disparities in social well-being between districts, within vulnerable territories (oasis areas, mountainous areas, rural areas, landlocked areas, etc. ) and between cities of different sizes.

Rafael González-Val (p), Arturo Ramos, Samuel Standaert

Ilyes Boumahdi

We take advantage of a new data set on Belgian cities to test random growth, that is, Gibrat’s law. This unique data set provides annual population estimates for all Belgian municipalities (2,680 cities) from 1880 to 1970. The use of panel data methodology and unit root tests can provide a precise test of Gibrat’s law (a unit root is equivalent to random growth). We run both time series and panel data unit root tests, obtaining strong support for random growth in the long term. The results hold when we allow for the presence of one and two structural breaks in the mean, and the timing of the breaks coincides with some major historical events, such as the World Wars and the economic crisis of 1929–1933.

Ana Maria Agape (p), Corneliu Iatu

Rafael González-Val

The revolution of 1989 meant not only a change of political regime, but also a change in the demographic behaviour of the Romanian people. This change was also evident in the fluctuation of the school population. The direct consequence was a contraction of the school network visible in the reduction of the number of students and school units. The Roman municipality and the area around it have undergone profound transformations, the secondary school units entering into a direct competition for attracting as many students as possible, in the conditions in which the administrative units release lower and lower flows to the polarizing centre, which this city represents.
Roman municipality is a city of rank II in the urban hierarchy of the North-East development region of Romania, being the second largest city in Neamț County, with a resident population of 68,653 inhabitants in 2020. From the point of view of educational services, the polarizing power of the municipality over the surrounding areas is obvious, given the diversity of educational offer and the historical trend of orienting the population towards educational, medical or administrative-financial services offered by this urban centre. The area of influence of the Roman municipality considered for the present scientific approach was delimited starting from the computerized distribution of the students in the ninth grade, which provides clear information on the place of origin of the students. The main hypothesis from which this approach starts is that the current school network predisposes to the appearance of obvious territorial disparities between rural and urban, disparities reflected in the size of the school unit, in the level of schooling offered within each administrative unit and in the direction and size of migratory flows between two types of environments. The purpose of this article is to determine the area of educational influence of the Roman municipality and to verify if this area overlap over the territorial limits of Neamț County.

John Gibson (p)

Ana Maria Agape

A growing literature in economics and regional science uses satellite-detected night-time lights data to estimate spatial inequality. These spatial inequality estimates are used to make comparisons between regions and to estimate temporal trends in inequality. Many of these studies rely on Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) night-time lights data which are poorly suited to use as a proxy for spatial inequality, because the DMSP data have spatially mean-reverting errors. These mean-reverting errors are due to inherent blurring of the DMSP images, where light is attributed to places it is not emitted, and to top-coding which attenuates differences in brightness between big cities and smaller towns. Consequently, estimates of spatial inequality that are based on DMSP data are significantly lower than the inequality estimates coming from sub-national GDP data. The inequality estimates derived from DMSP data are also significantly lower than what newer, research-focused and more accurate satellites show from their observations of the earth at night. In this paper, second and third level sub-national data from China, Indonesia and the United States are used to demonstrate the understatement of spatial inequality when DMSP data are used. In all three settings, benchmark data on sub-national GDP are available for establishing the actual level and trend in spatial inequality, which is then used to assess the accuracy of the estimates coming from remote sensing sources. In the rush to use big data it is important that researchers do not lose sight of basic measurement error features of some of these data sources which, if ignored, may lead to distorted understanding of important spatial patterns in inequality.