Potencial de mercado, desarrollo y capital humanomodelos de nueva geografía económica y sus implicaciones para el caso de Galicia

Abstract

This thesis addresses the existence of a spatial concentration pattern of economic activities and human capital in the regions (the so called “comarcas”) of Galicia within the framework of the models of geographical economics. The first essay of the thesis gives an overall picture of the distribution of economic activities across the Galician regions showing the existence of a well-defined West-East pattern in the location of economic activities by computing the regions´ market potentials. In the second essay a model of geographical economics is used to test for the existence of disparities in the levels of income per capita across the Galician regions over the period 2003-2013. In this essay an econometric specification that relates the levels of development in the different locations of the space with a weighted sum of the volume of economic activity in each location is derived. The results of the econometric estimations for the 53 Galician regions over the period 2003-2013 show that the market potential has a positive and significant impact in the determination of the levels of income per capita in Galicia. In the third essay, departing from the seminal contribution of REDDING and SCHOTT (2003), a model of geographical economics with endogenous human capital accumulation is derived and estimated. The model relates educational attainment levels with the economic geography of the different locations. The estimation of the model, using different variables that approximate the educational levels in the Galician regions, shows the existence of a positive and significant relationship between regions´ market potential and the educational attainment levels, thus confirming the existence of a spatial gradient in the distribution of the human capital.