Renato Garcia (p), Mauricio Serra, Suelene Mascarini, Anelise Peixoto dos Santos, Larissa Modolo, Dayanne Santos

Jouke van Dijk

Since the 2000s there has been a growing interest in the quality of government amongst academics and policy makers. This concern stems from the perception that the quality of government institutions can produce different social and economic impacts on societies (Rothstein & Teorell, 2008). In general, the quality of government is understood as impartiality in the exercise of power, high quality in the delivery of public services and low corruption. Most studies on quality of government have focused on the national level. Nevertheless, recently a growing set of research has increasingly sought to investigate how sub-national governments affect geographical differences in economic output and development, using new indicators to measure sub-national government quality (Charron & Lapuente, 2013; Charron, Dijkstra & Lapuente, 2014). The shift in focus has given rise to a series of empirical studies that set up links between the quality of government and regional development, in which innovation, economic growth, entrepreneurship and decentralisation have been scrutinised. However, this growing body of studies has centred, to a large extent, their attention on European countries. This implies that the rest of the world, particularly developing countries, remains a black box (Iddawela et al., 2021).
Bearing in mind this gap in the literature, a regional quality of government index for Brazil, named BR-QoG, was developed. This effort is a novelty in Brazil and, at the same time, represents an important step towards a better understanding of regional realities and, as a consequence, of the country itself, which has some key particularities: it is the largest country in South America; the ninth economy in the world; a regional power in Latin America; and a highly unequal country. Furthermore, this effort is also a contribution to the existing literature insofar as the discussion on the quality of government, as mentioned above, has been largely directed towards the European context.

Eduardo Haddad, Inácio Araújo, Fernando Perobelli (p)

Renato Garcia

Regional input-output (IO) analysis is often anchored under national input-output systems. Despite recognizing that regional production recipes differ, researchers assume, without any embarrassment, that national technology prevails everywhere. In a world of limited information, the usual justification considers that the lack of appropriate data at the regional level can be surpassed by the assumption that the available technology for regional firms is given nationally. From a practitioner’s perspective, it translates into the assumption of national sectoral technology at the regional level leading to the prevalence of the same input mix for a given sector everywhere with differences only in the degree of interregional dependence on input sources.
Shared technology is a plausible working assumption for practitioners dealing with isolated or integrated subnational systems. Technological convergence in input-output technical coefficients, defined as high similarity between \mathbf{A} matrices, is more likely to be observed across regions within a country than across different countries, given the existing relative homogeneity in sub-national economic spaces.
Input-output practitioners also face conditions of limited information when dealing with national input-output models for countries with poor statistical institutions. Although many countries produce their supply and use tables (SUT) with different publication frequencies and levels of details, there are still many countries for which SUTs are dated or not available. To circumvent this problem, researchers adjust existing input-output tables from elsewhere to one or various of such countries by estimating or inferring the parts of the system that are undetermined – usually the technical coefficients (\mathbf{A} matrix) –, or even replicating the structure of a “similar” country.
Different experiences (e.g. GTAP, EORA, WIOD) with developing multiregional input-output (MRIO) share the common challenge of estimating individual country IO tables based on a limited set of information. We can cite the experiences of
We explore in this article the relationship between geographical proximity and technological similarity at the country level. Using a set of national tables extracted from the OECD MRIO database, which provides for each of the 43 countries in the sample a reconciled common sectoral classification, we first identify dimensions of proximity associated with countries’ similar technologies. We also check whether contiguity (i.e., sharing a common border) matters for the technological similarity between countries and whether nearby countries are more technologically similar than distant countries. We finally assess the effects of geographical proximity on technological convergence over time.

Jouke van Dijk (p)

Fernando Perobelli

Cross-border commuting might be a way to improve an efficient allocation of labour resources, improve the economic performance of border regions and reduce economic and territorial inequality. This study explores the impact of a set of socio-economic, infrastructural or cultural explanatory variables that drive cross-border commuting in the EU and Switzerland for all outgoing commuters from living countries and for all incoming commuters towards their working countries. We find that cross-border commuters respond in general in the theoretically expected way to wages, unemployment, accessibility, language similarity and distance. But besides these general findings we also find that, in the end, cross-border commuting is a result of push and pull factors that seem to work out differently for different groups of commuters. This may reduce the inequality at the region level both between countries and within countries, although the effects are most likely small given the relatively small number of commuters. However, the results by gender, age, education and sector show substantial differences indicating that at the level of individuals and specific groups the reduction in inequalities might be very limited and may even increase.