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Introduction

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Regional Inequality in Spain

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Economic History ((PEHS))

Abstract

Why is it important to study regional economic inequality? How does economics explain the existence of regional inequalities? How do we expect regional inequality to evolve in the course of economic development processes? How has regional economic inequality really evolved over the last 30 years? And in the long term? This introductory chapter presents a short approach to these issues and then introduces the main research questions that will be dealt with throughout the book in order to provide an in-depth study of how regional inequality has evolved over the entire trajectory of economic development in Spain, that is, since the mid-nineteenth century until today.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    GDP per capita in Norway, currently one of the top-ranked countries in the world, is over 70,000 $. This is more than 100 times greater than that of the poorest country, the Central African Republic, which barely reaches 680 $ (international dollars, purchasing power parity [PPP]). IMF figures.

  2. 2.

    Hunan, which occupies 16th position among the 31 provinces of China, has a per-capita GDP of around 13,000 $. Zhang and Zhang (2003) and Kanbur and Zhang (2005), among others, study the evolution of regional inequality in China.

  3. 3.

    One exception would be Milanovic (2005), who analyses the five most populated countries in the world (China, India, the US, Indonesia and Brazil) between approximately 1980 and 2000, but finds no link between trade openness and regional inequality.

  4. 4.

    On a related subject, NEG models provide ambiguous results concerning the impact of trade openness on a country’s internal economic geography (Krugman and Livas Elizondo 1996; Paluzie 2001; Crozet and Koenig 2004; Hanson 2005). An overview of this literature is given in Brülhart (2011).

  5. 5.

    Gardiner et al. (2011) question Brülhart and Sbergami’s (2009) results. They look at the relationship between agglomeration and growth in the EU-15 (1981–2007), but their results are inconclusive. They note that the relationship’s existence lacks robustness when they introduce different agglomeration measures and change the size of the territorial units (NUTS1 or NUTS2). They also point out that the robustness of the results is reduced because only a limited period is studied (1960–2000).

  6. 6.

    This methodology is in line with Gennaioli et al. (2014), who worked with data for 83 countries covering recent decades. Depending on the availability of data, they found evidence of a regional convergence rate close to the 2 per cent generally seen in the growth literature. Magrini (2004) and Breinlich et al. (2014) contain reviews of the empirical literature on regional growth and convergence.

  7. 7.

    He found that this was the case in 37 of the 50 US states by the early 1980s.

  8. 8.

    See also List and Gallet (1999).

  9. 9.

    For a critical review of the different estimates available for France, see Díez-Minguela and Sanchis (2017).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of València, València, Spain

    Alfonso Díez-Minguela, Julio Martinez-Galarraga & Daniel A. Tirado-Fabregat

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  1. Alfonso Díez-Minguela
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  3. Daniel A. Tirado-Fabregat
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Díez-Minguela, A., Martinez-Galarraga, J., Tirado-Fabregat, D.A. (2018). Introduction. In: Regional Inequality in Spain. Palgrave Studies in Economic History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96110-1_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96110-1_1

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