John Paul Clifford (p)

Daniel Sánchez Serra

The purpose of this research is to gain a deeper understanding of the impact of infrastructure in driving city growth. The results may inform policy makers around the dynamics of different cities and provide valuable insights which would be relevant from a regional and spatial perspective.

With respect to cities, larger agglomerations of firms is linked with increasing productivity and thus growth along with the accumulation and spill over effects of the creation of knowledge and skills. This factors result in cities being more productive.

The development of infrastructure is considered a key component in unlocking and facilitating existing economic growth as well as sustaining future economic growth. The role of investment is critical as the development of large scale infrastructure projects can facilitate key connectivity points in the delivery of goods and services, often between multiple agglomerations.

This research will identify the dynamics between agglomerations and infrastructure development. With consistent increasing concentrations of people living in cities, the demand for the types and placement of, specific kinds of infrastructure, is of increasing interest to both citizens and policymakers from a spatial perspective.

Patricia Helena Nogueira Turco Turco, Adriana Martins, Ricard Firetti, Antônio Alves Neto (p), Kaori Polis

John Paul Clifford

The Brazilian coffee occupying a prominent place in the world scenario for its high production, with the use of technologies, with emphasis on the launch of new cultivars, grafted seedlings, mechanization, irrigation and used of good practies harvesting and post-harvest, with positive impacts on productivity, competitiveness and final product quality. As it is a product with economic relevance, the objective of this study is the production cost and its economic indicators, of the cultivar Obatã 1669-20 grafted on Apoatã IAC 2258, being the cultivar most planted by regional coffee growers. The agronomic data were obtained from a field experiment whose production system effectively represents the reality of the central west region of the state of São Paulo, Brazil. Were raised the effective and total operating costs (CARP) and productivity were for the period from 2016 to 2021. The data used for the structuring of technical coefficients were collected from the producer. At the same time, a scientific experiment was carried out, simulating a production system to verify production rates at Fazenda Recreio, in Vera Cruz – SP. The concept of effective and total operational cost and profitability used by the Instituto de Economia Agrícola - IEA was used. The coffee biennial and a very evident distinction in the Obatã 1669-20 cultivar, it is observed that the 2017/2018 and 2019/2020 harvests were of high productivity with 70.2 and 95.2 bags per hectare respectively. In the 2018/2019 crop, profitability was negative at -18.1%, as there was a break in the crop due to weather problems, mainly lack of rain and high temperatures in the most important periods of the culture, as such flowering and graining. The prices obtained by the producer are one of the most important items to be observed, as in 2019 the value was US$127.25 with the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 causing the price to rise in 2021 reaching US$189.47. The estimate of the effective operating cost for the year 2021 it arrived 21.3% more compared to the year 2020, and the total operating cost to 19.6%, this was due to the significant increase in the prices of inputs as a result of the global economic instability and the COVID-19 pandemic. The best profitability was in the 2019/2020 crop, reaching 73.74%, in the six the crop years studied.

Luca Bertolotti (p), Mario Biggeri, Donatella Saccone, Mattia Tassinari

Antonio Neto

The Agenda 2030 is the tool adopted to tackle the social and economic challenges faced by the international community. The agenda was launched in 2015, resuming and updating the experience of the Millennium Development Goals which since 2000 provide a common ground to evaluate world development, relating this term not only to economic growth but to multidimensional achievements. Indeed, the Agenda 2030 lists 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The goals are meant to have a universal meaning, so their importance is not biased towards the needs of the developed (nor developing) countries or to subnational regions.
This paper adopts the perspective of SDGs to compare the development of the USA and China at subnational level between 2015 and 2019. The comparison between these two countries is receiving increasing attention, leading economists to interrogate about the timing of China’s economy overtake of the US’s one and political scientists to compare their capacity to appear a reference model for global development. Indeed, a quantitative approach based on the SDGs paradigm maintain the objectivity and comparability of monetary analyses but broadening the focus on an aspect, sustainable development, which is crucial for the future of humanity.
The achievements of these two countries are disaggregated at subnational level to obtain the Integrated Sustainable Development (ISD) Index which provides a measure about the SDGs achievements attained at the local level, which is more representative of the concept of Human Development. Moreover, moving the focus at the subnational level allows to catch the spatial inequalities within these countries and to test if there is convergence. Finally, from this perspective it is possible to observe the trade-offs and synergies across the Goals, exploring thus how the space of the Capabilities of individuals and communities.
When the ISD scores of US’ states and China’s provinces are combined, we observe how the two groups overlap. The stronger growth recorded in China, moreover, mirrors in a jump of the provinces that occupied the lowest ranks, while the top positions are maintained by US states. In other words, Chinese provinces are concentrating in the middle of the mixed ranking. Focusing on the top performers, some of the top performing (and famous) units in both countries remained almost stuck: this is the case of Beijing and Shanghai, and New York and California. Both countries experienced both σ- and β-convergence, although this process has been much stronger in China.

Daniel Sánchez Serra (p), Àlex Costa, Vittorio Galletto, Jaume Garcia, Josep Lluís Raymond

Luca Bortolotti

This paper estimates sub-national Purchasing Power Parities (PPPs) for OECD countries. Due to the lack of PPPs at sub-national level, regional Gross Domestic Product (GDP) figures have been traditionally adjusted using national PPPs. The simplifying assumption that there are no regional differences in a country, and implicitly that all regions of a country have the same cost of living, might lead to regional GDP figures (adjusted for national PPPs) that are biased and might limit the design and implementation of regional policies. This paper tries to overcome this problem by estimating PPPs at sub-national level for OECD countries (TL2 regions) and EU-27 countries (NUTS2 regions) for a time series 2000-2018 through an econometric method, which uses publicly available data and is based on the Balassa-Samuelson hypothesis. The method used in this paper consists of three steps. Step one identifies the relationship between price level, income level and composition of the GDP at regional level in the United States. This relationship is used in step two to estimate OECD regional prices. OECD regional prices are then used to estimate OECD regional price parity indices in step three. This paper also presents the implications of adjusting regional macroeconomic figures with sub-national PPPs in terms of economic welfare, regional convergence and the impact on EU cohesion funds.