Luz Dary Beltran Jaimes (p), M. Carmen Delgado Lopez, Pilar Campoy-Muñoz

Pedro Franco

In Spain, poverty and social exclusion is an atypical phenomenon in a country with a high level of income, reflecting the inability to generate better conditions and forcing us to think about the need to restructure current public policies. Therefore, migrating towards a social transformation would lead to achieving a real change with equity and economic development, but for this is necessary to implement structural measures that articulate the economic policy decisions taken at different levels.
The current indicators of poverty risk, inequality, low participation of wages in added value, and the gender wage gap reflect the great challenges in terms of social inclusion that must be faced as a result of a series of structural problems, labor market deficiencies, insufficient tax collection, and redistributive capacity, which are expected to have been accentuated after the pandemic.
Spain's economic and social recovery is conditioned to the resolution of these problems, highlighting the need to strengthen fiscal measures aimed at reinforcing growth capacity, fundamentally through the implementation of reforms in the benefits system and in the tax system that guarantee social inclusion. Therefore, these structural adjustment measures could help to recover macroeconomic stability, improve income distribution and implement better development strategies.
The above motivates this research, which aims to evaluate counterfactual public policies to achieve an inclusive society that strengthens social transformation by addressing the structural problems of the Spanish economy. The objective will be achieved by means of a dynamic applied general equilibrium model to identify fiscal policies with redistributive capacity and that lead to effective action in terms of indicators of social inclusion and economic growth. This will be calibrated on the basis of a social accounting matrix constructed for Spain with households disaggregated by income, gender, skill, and age groups, which will make it possible to detail the effects of the proposed measures on Spanish households.

Pedro Franco (p), Eduarda Marques da Costa

Katalin Füzér

A fundamental concept for the European Union and supported by the Member States is territorial cohesion. However, despite the effort developed through European policies and programs, regional disparities are a constant and encompass the multiple dimensions that characterize the territories (at different levels, for example, in the economic, social, administrative, among others). These inequalities are severe obstacles to regional development and to the convergence process, being more accentuated in peripheral or rural regions. Among the categories where disparities are latent are the services of general interest (SEGI) - which are basic and essential services for the population and over which the States have the obligation to guarantee standards of supply -, whose supply is often non-existent or inadequate. And the fact is that without these services there is no territorial cohesion and regional development is hampered, with the lack of supply being linked to socioeconomic decline and demographic processes that are harmful to the future of the regions. Thus, in order to understand and rank the factors that influence the offer of SEGI and the way in which the regions relate to them, a methodology based on 12 variables (economic, social, demographic, territorial occupation, local administration, services) was developed, which were analyzed through principal component analysis and cluster analysis. The major influencing factors in the supply of SEGI were found and ranked. The results show that socioeconomic conditions are the most important factor for the existence of provision, although peripherality/urbanity, administrative capacity or the population age structure also contribute to this. The findings not only reiterate that territorial cohesion remains a dream difficult to achieve, but also indicates that peripheral or rural regions - given their characteristics - tend to maintain (and even enhance) the obstacles to development that haunt them.

Silvia Emili (p), Cristina Bernini, Maria Ferrante

Pedro Franco

The idea that people adapt to poverty and deprivation by learning to suppress their wants, hopes and aspirations has gained a great deal of currency in development ethics (Clark, 2009). In particular, this line of thought is frequently cited as a reason for moving away from utilitarian-inspired concepts of well-being based on happiness or the fulfilment of desires. Inspired by the meaningful role of mental adaption and transition to poverty to a multidimensional SWB perspective, this work aims at shedding the light on few drawbacks in the literature about subjective wellbeing, poverty and territorial dimensions. In particular, we investigate the role of poverty adaption both as mental status and as repeated material condition over time, with data obtained through the statistical matching of the ISTAT surveys of Aspect of Daily Life and Households Budget Survey, for the period 2011-2017. In this regard, in this paper we propose a multi-dimensional matching approach to investigate the joint information about poverty condition, life domains and mental adaption for Italy, aiming to investigate territorial disparities on the effect of poverty metrics and poverty adaption measures on satisfaction of Italian resident with six life domains. The joint information allows to show the effect of adaption to poverty on different life domains of subjective well-being, stressing the role of cultural and regional characteristics in the individual perceptions.

Katamin Füzér (p), László Szerb, Dávid Erát, Bence Völgyi, Réka Horeczki

Silvia Emili

Digitalization has been a prime factor of social change already for decades and the COVID-19 pandemic gives new impetus to the spread and more intensive use of digital technologies. This study offers a pre-pandemic account of a crucial aspect of global social inequalities by combining two hitherto largely distinct approaches, social capital and the digital divides. By integrating the perspective of the three digital divides into an investigation of global social capital inequalities, we find typical patterns of social capital inequalities across 76 countries worldwide and a strong correlation between conventional measures of prosperity and the digitally enhanced composite indicators of bonding, bridging and linking social capital. Our evidence on the social embeddedness of digitalization in the pre-pandemic world offers a framework for thinking about policy interventions to mitigate the sources and consequences of the vast inequalities uncovered in the present study and serves as a standard against which to measure the impact of COVID-19 triggered digitalization.
In contrast to concepts of social capital which obscure the variety within the dimensions of trust, norms, and social connections, we 1. treat bonding, bridging and linking social capital as distinctive phenomena, 2. extend their conceptual and empirical scope to cover technology-mediated social interactions, 3. study their relation to prosperity separately, 4. do not integrate them into a single composite social capital index (as is conventional in the literature) but use them towards drawing the social capital country profiles of digitalized, industrialized and traditional societies. Composite indicators for bonding, bridging and linking social capital are constructed along the three pillars of trust and norms; ties and connections; and the technology that mediates social interaction using 32 indicators for 76 countries. We study the correlation of social capital indexes with prosperity outcomes and draw the social capital profiles of three clusters of countries. Digitalized, industrialized and traditional societies offer very different settings for bridging the digital divides and highlight the complexity of social circumstances of technology use worldwide, with implications for policy interventions in the new area of COVID-19 triggered digitalization.