Carolina Guevara Rosero (p), Stefany Llumiquinga, Melany Tulcán, Miguel Flores

Maria Rego

According to the United Nations (2021), the Latin American and the Caribbean region has become the most violent region in the world. Within this context, Ecuador has experienced an increase in violence due to the presence of street gangs, added to the presence of criminal groups from Colombia, Mexico and Europe for being a strategic point for cocaine trafficking. By 2022 the rate of violent deaths was 25.32 violent deaths per 100 thousand inhabitants, making it one of the most dangerous countries in Latin America. Within the country, the cantons that register the highest violent death rate are located in the coastal area, specifically in the provinces of Los Ríos, Guayas, Esmeraldas, El Oro and Manabí, one in the Sierra region, in the province of Cañar, suggesting that there is a spatial pattern of crime.
Based on this, the objective of this study is to determine the level of spatial dependence of crime, measured through violent murders, in Ecuador and its determining factors, emphasizing on the effect of the judicial system. To carry out the study, different data sources are used: the Ministry of the Interior, the Ministry of Education, the National Employment and Unemployment Survey (ENEMDU), the State Attorney General's Office, the Ombudsman's Office, the National Service for Attention to Adults Deprived of Liberty and Adolescent Offenders (SNAI) and the Ecuadorian Observatory of Organized Crime (OECE). Our database accounts for information of 218 cantons from 2011 to 2021. An Exploratory Spatial Data Analysis and a spatial econometric models are used.
Based on the LISA indicator, different types of clusters were identified: clusters of crime, clusters of non-crime, crime islands, non-crime islands and changing cantons. Crime clusters prevail over time, showing greater presence in the areas of the Coast region, while the non-crime cluster locates in the highland region. Regarding the spatial econometric results, our variables of interest related to the judicial system are significant. The judicial congestion rate and the unsentenced prison index are associated with higher violent murder rates. This evidences the ineffciency of the judicial system, which constitutes a driver of crime. Other factors such as basic needs poverty rate and the level of drug seizures are associated with high crime levels. The employment rate and the level of serious complaints decrease the level of murders. Other variables such as the police efficiency, the school dropout, the population density were not significant to explain the crime rate.

Ricardo Martinez De Vega Perancho (p), Fernando Rubiera-Morollon, Alberto Diaz-Dapena

Carolina Guevara Rosero

Voices from postindustrial, peripheral cities, and rural environments, alongside regional political movements across Europe, have emerged in recent years, drawing attention to the so-called “left behind places”. Even though this term has not been clearly defined, it has nonetheless become a prominent topic of discussion in the regional science literature. Researchers have studied both the causes and consequences of such a phenomenon, highlighting the need for strategic public policies that foster integration of these places with their surroundings, mitigating the adverse effects on the local population. This article proposes a multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) methodology, using the Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution, TOPSIS, method and its unweighted variant, for systematically identifying and studying these places. This MCDA allows us to create a ranking of municipalities based on a set of variables such as economic activity, employment, educational attainment, among others, thereby identifying those left behind. To achieve this, data from the last two censuses across 17 European countries have been collected at the municipal (LAU 2) level. This approach not only enriches the existing literature by presenting a specific identification tool but also establishes groundwork to inform and guide regional policy in these areas. Additionally, the presented method offers an innovative framework for future research in other regional contexts, opening new avenues to understand and tackle regional development inequalities.

Fabiano Compagnucci (p), Gabriele Morettini

Ricardo Martinez De Vega Perancho

The term ‘left behind’ has become increasingly common in the last decade due to its association with the rise of the so-called populistic movements, which have recently undermined local, national and EU establishments. This rising discontent, however, cannot be simply considered as a contingent phenomenon and the result of dramatic shifts in the political opinion. Rather, they signal the persistence of inequalities and long-term processes of socioeconomic marginalisation in Western countries, which negatively affect the performances and, more importantly, the opportunities of specific population strata. Based on the notion of territorial identity as defined by Capello, which includes economic, cultural and relational assets, our paper provides an original contribution to the empirical and theoretical debate on the understanding of the relationship between the issue of left behind places with territorial identity and inequality. We applied principal component and cluster analyses to a set of Italian mountain municipalities of Umbria and Marche regions. We subsequently identified five different typologies of these left behind places as of the early 1950s and examined how they reacted to external shocks in two subsequent periods (1951–1981 and 1981–2011), corresponding to the Italian economic miracle (from the early 50s to the late ‘60s) and to the emergence of the ICT revolution and globalisation. The results suggest the changing importance of the cognitive, cultural and relational domains in coping with the different phases of Italian economic development: different territorial identities have shaped local responses to exogenous shocks, and thus their capability to follow lock-in patterns or to de-lock.

Maria Rego (p)

Fabiano Compagnucci

Throughout the end of the 20th century and the beginning of this century, the regions of the European Union member countries have been experiencing different challenges, many of which are related to differences in development as well as the different ways in which the regions have evolved in economic and social terms. Recently, a European Commission working document entitled “The geography of EU discontent and the regional development trap”, written by Andrés Rodríguez-Pose, Lewis Dijkstra and Hugo Poelman, draws attention to the fact that different regions are facing what is defined as a trap for regional development, in addition to reiterating the fact that, in many regions of the European Union, citizens are expressing their discontent, following a loss of quality of life, voting for populist parties with an anti-system matrix.
The regional development trap has been defined as "the state of a region unable to maintain its economic dynamism in terms of income, productivity and employment, while at the same time underperforming its national and European peers in these same dimensions" (Diemer et al., 2022, cited in Rodriguez Pose et al., 2023: 14). A region thus falls into a development trap if the prosperity of its inhabitants “does not improve in relation to its past performance and the economic conditions prevailing in national and European markets” (Diemer et al., 2022, cited in Rodriguez Pose et al., 2023: 14).
If the cohesion and structural reform policy has been devoting particular attention to regions with low levels of economic growth, according to the GDPpc Index measure, the regions that face, more intensely, the development trap have , in many cases, characteristics distinct from the first and cannot continue to “be left behind”.
In this communication, and using the concept of “development trap” as a framework, it is proposed to evaluate, in detail, the socioeconomic characteristics of Portuguese regions, and the way in which they have evolved over the last two decades, in order to understand the intensity and duration of this phenomenon. This communication will be the first essay on this topic, with detail on the study of Portuguese regions, which is intended to evolve in order to propose public policy measures with a view to both creating conditions for improving citizens' quality of life and reducing of inter-regional asymmetries.