Spillover Effects of Transport Infrastructure and Regional Conflicts in Spain

Abstract

This chapter analyses some internal territorial and economic conflicts in Spain among its autonomous communities. The Basque country has a very favourable tax system from 1878, which historically is stipulated in the Spanish constitution as a special case. This generates an asymmetry with respect to the other 18 Spanish communities including Catalonia, which would like to have a fiscal regime similar to that of the Basque country. After the Spanish state has built the fiscal balances for all autonomous communities, the Catalans argue that Spain steals them and they demand independence for Catalonia, which would affect the political and economic stability of the European Union. Specifically, this chapter attempts to describe a way to resolve territorial conflicts that have been exacerbated by the results of the fiscal balances in a context of fiscal decentralisation, since capital stock balances are not considered in the fiscal balances or in the inter-regional balance of payments. In this chapter, a production function approach, where the public capital production factor is separated into internal and imported capital stock, is used to calculate how the capital stock of the transportation infrastructure actually used can affect the labour productivity in each province or region. This study takes into account the direct effects of the capital stock of the road transport infrastructure of a region and the indirect effects that it receives from the use of infrastructures in other regions. Both types of public capital have been calculated by a network analysis, which allows us to calculate the stock of public capital effectively used in commercial activities, across 47 Spanish provinces during the period 1980–2007. The author estimates the spillover effects using spatial panel data techniques including spatial auto-correlation models with auto-regressive disturbances. In terms of labour productivity, the results indicate that the stock of imported capital is highly significant in all estimates while internal capital is not significant for all Spanish provinces, which classifies the Spanish provinces into users and used. This indicates that capital stock balances should be considered in some way into the inter-regional compensation fund to balance local fiscal balances, minimising some conflicts among regions.

Citation

Barreiro-Pereira, F. (2021), "Spillover Effects of Transport Infrastructure and Regional Conflicts in Spain", Chatterji, M. and Gangopadhyay, P. (Ed.) New Frontiers in Conflict Management and Peace Economics: With a Focus on Human Security (Contributions to Conflict Management, Peace Economics and Development, Vol. 29), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 57-77. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1572-832320210000029005