Stella González Fuentes (p)

Gender labour market segregation reinforces material, symbolic and political inequalities. Segregation dynamics have been described as a factor causing women to receive average lower salaries. Some strands in literature suggest that gender segregation also induces inefficient resource allocation within labour markets. In order to tackle this issue appropriately, at least two aspects appear as relevant from both descriptive and policy-making perspectives. On the one hand, are they different drivers affecting labour market segregation? On the other hand, do drivers evolve homogeneously across space? In this article, we observe gender segregation in the Spanish regions after the financial crisis (2011-2022). We decompose Karmel-MacLachlan index variations into composition, occupation and gender effects. Not only we provide a national overview, but we also report geographically differentiated trends. Our results show that not all regions have experimented decreases in their labour market gender-based segregation. In addition, drivers behind segregation dynamics appear to be significantly heterogeneous. From a descriptive point of view, our research raises questions about which regional socio-economic, cultural or political features might influence segregation. From a normative perspective, findings dissuade one-size-fits-all policies encouraging close collaboration between different levels of government.

Peter Njekwa Ryberg (p)

Automation technologies displace labor in favor of capital, but such technologies can also complement workers and enhance their productivity, which potentially increases labor demand. Whichever of the displacement effect and productivity effect is the strongest depends not only on the technology, but also on the labor force and industry composition of the region in which it is adopted; the impact of automation on labor is nonuniform across space, some regions are more resilient to the displacement effect of automation. I examine in this paper the displacement effect and productivity effect of automation from a regional economics perspective. To capture the heterogeneous impact that automation can have on occupations across industries and regions, I divide occupations by industry and local labor markets. The task content of an occupation provides an idea of how susceptible a job in said occupation is to displacement by automation. In my analysis I use the task contents of occupations to measure their probability of automation and find that occupations more susceptible to automation are associated with lower employment growth and wage growth, a relationship which describes a displacement effect. When examining how the automation impacts differ across local labor markets in Sweden during 2016-2021, I find that the displacement effect is stronger in rural local labor markets while the productivity effect is stronger in urban local labor markets, which encompass the largest cities of Sweden; they have a larger economic resilience, as measured by total employment, job connectivity and occupation and industry diversity, to offset the displacement effect.

Bilver Astorquiza (p)

This paper seeks to prove that despite the efforts made by governments in terms of reducing poverty have not been strong enough to achieve levels of convergence within the countries. In this sense, two hypotheses are tested: (i) the poverty has persisted in the last two decades in most countries of Latin America and (ii) there is spatial dependence among the political administrative units (departments) that explain this phenomenon. The testing strategy consists of providing evidence for an emerging economy like the Colombian and for that, the monetary poverty data between 1997-2019 are analyzed for the 23 main departments and its capital Bogotá DC. Subsequently, a General Nesting Spatial Model by panel data is estimated, which examines the degree of association of two components based on theory as poverty reduction: economic growth and income distribution and control variables such as unemployment and murders rates, percentage of women and two measures of conflict in order to know if they are consistent when spatiality is involved. The results confirm the hypothesis of persistence of poverty, since the analysis of beta and sigma convergence suggest that it takes 16.4 years for the poverty gaps to be reduced by half in Latin America and 17.3 years for Colombia. Besides, the hypothesis of spatial dependence is sustained and, therefore, the estimates made to analyze it that did not consider this assumption have been biased and inefficient. Finally, its verified that there are positive effects of economic growth and the mechanisms of income distribution to reduce monetary poverty. Likewise, the murder and unemployment rates, percentage of women and the conflict variables explain the persistence of poverty.