Jesus Lopez-Rodriguez, Paulino Montes-Solla (p)

Davide Fiaschi

Convergence is one of the fundamental objectives of the EU to achieve co-hesion among its regions. The paper analyzes the process of economic con-vergence among Spanish regions focusing mainly on the impact of European Funds investments and on the stock of transport infrastructures. A series of growth regression have been estimated using a panel data for 17 Spanish re-gions over the period 1989-2017. The data were obtained from the FBBVA-IVIE database and from the EU regional policy reports of the Spanish gov-ernment. The results obtained show that a convergence process across Span-ish regions has taken place since Spain accession to the EU. The European Funds investments and the level of transport infrastructures are relevant for economic growth, but do not generate a strong catching-up process.

Chris Pitelis (p), Eleni Piteli

Paulino Montes-Solla

This paper reviews debates on monopoly and competition in economics and management theory, to inform contemporary anti-trust/competition policy. It claims that extant antitrust policy is not designed to address today’s realities of platform-based global oligopolies and that a new approach is required that accounts for their specificities and fosters world-wide sustainable development. This requires addressing constraints to sustainability and innovation-fostering fair, workable and healthy competition and co-opetition, diversity, and pluralism, intra and inter-nationally. Peoples, policymakers, and international organisations should help co-create the conditions that thwart regulatory capture and review available options to foster competition. These include eliminating conflicts of interest embedded within the business model of platform oligopolies, internalising negative externalities from their operations, determining the full real prices charged for services, discouraging anti-competitive acquisitions, fostering new firm creation and growth and breaking monopolies when required, in a way that does not undermine the innovation and value creating aspects of their activities.

Davide Fiaschi (p), Cristiano Ricci

Chris Pitelis

This paper considers an economy where agents mobility is driven by differential utilities over space, production and consumption show spatial spillovers, and there exist exogenous and endogenous amenities. The spatial dynamics of population is derived as the mean-field limit of a system of interacting agents as the number of agents becomes infinite.
Numerical experiments show that the model can reproduce several stylized effects, as the emergence of cities with different size and shape; the importance of history, with small perturbations in the initial population distribution leading to substantial differences in the long-run dynamics; the phenomenon of metastability, where a long period of stability in the spatial distribution is followed by a sharp transition to a new (meta) stable equilibrium; and, finally, a non-linear out-of-equilibrium dynamics, with regions with a first phase of increasing, followed by a phase of decreasing, population.