Applied Economics

The European Higher Education Area (EHEA) provides the opportunity of exploring new ways of teaching and learning, emphasizing the role of students in the learning process. In the case of Econometrics (which will play an outstanding role in Economics and Business degrees), our experience has shown that doing Econometrics is a suitable way of learning Econometrics and also that Gretl is a powerful teaching tool, providing our students a wide variety of competences and skills.
This paper summarizes our experiences with Gretl during the last years, including both presential and online learning and combining teachers and students points of view.

The explanation of economic inequality and its relationship to growth has produced a great amount of research. Kuznets (1955) formulated the “inverted-U” hypothesis according to which inequality increases in the initial levels of development to decrease later on, after a certain point of return. This proposition has been the subject of great attention with many theoretical and empirical contributions. In this paper we present an analytical approach to the growth-inequality relationship, including not only the most common measures, but also new indicators based on the information theory.The work also includes the estimation of the growth-inequality relationship and the contrast of the Kuznets´ hypothesis within Latin America.

La elaboración de predicciones de crecimiento sectorial regional es el principal objetivo de la red Hispalink desde hace más de dos décadas. En este trabajo, realizado en colaboración, se combinan las aportaciones de varios equipos regionales y el equipo central para describir el método de trabajo y algunas de nuestras experiencias en el ámbito de Hispalink.

In recent years, attention has been focused on the digital divide, defined as “the gap between individuals, households, businesses and geographic areas at different socio-economic levels with regard both to their opportunities to access Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) and to their use of the Internet for a wide variety of activities”.
Reduction of these gaps is considered as a strategic goal in different contexts and it is widely agreed that the education can play an important role in the achievement of this objective.
In the context of the European Union several initiatives have been launched in order to achieve “the world’s most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy, capable of sustainable economic growth and with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion” as approved at the Lisbon Summit (2000). Thus, the e-Learning initiative aims to boost the change from traditional education to systematic applications of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) for the provision of flexible learning, encouraging the development of contents, services and learning environments, improving cooperation and dialogue at different spatial levels and between all the participants in the field.
In this paper we suggest the convenience of stimulating the development of university networks, describing some recent initiatives. We mainly focus on the European university context and we briefly summarize the experience of the G9 Virtual Network including nine Spanish universities.

In the last few years there has been a tendency towards the study of statistical techniques and economic applications which provide more flexible methods than the traditional ones, such as the study of nonlinear models, the use of fuzzy sets, the development of fractional ARIMA models (ARFIMA) or the proposition of autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity models (ARCH). This last contribution provides new methods of analyzing economic time series with time-varying volatility and his author R. Engle has been distinguished with the 2003 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences.
In this study two measures of information are presented: the double quadratic uncertainty and the double quadratic uncertainty involving utilities, studying their main properties.
The double quadratic uncertainty is determined by two indexes in the family of uncertainty measures of order β, introduced by J.Havrda and F. Charvát (1967). The double quadratic uncertainty involving utilities is determined by two indicators in the family of measures of uncertainty involving utilities of order β. Therefore both measures of information could be considered as a fractional case of the families of the above mentioned measures, providing expressions which in certain fields turn out to be more flexible and therefore more suitable to those family indicators.

The Kuznets´ hypothesis according to which inequality increases in the initial levels of development to decrease later on, after a certain point of return, has been the subject of great attention with many theoretical and empirical contributions. Thus, from the analytic point of view it has been pointed out that Kuznets “inverted-U” model is based on restrictive assumptions, suggesting the convenience of further extensions that describe in a more realistic way the relation between economic growth and inequality. On the other hand, the empirical results come conditioned by the considered sample, the selected indicators and the estimation techniques. In this paper we consider new inequality indicators, deriving their analytic relation with the economic growth and testing their validity with the available information.

Several changes are taking place in the energy sector as a result of the development of renewable energies, which offer the chance to decrease energy dependence, also creating employment.
Therefore this article focuses on employment expectations generated by renewable energies in Asturias during the period 2006-2010. With this aim, we consider alternative scenarios according to a range of possible future renewable energy pathways. We also analyse the emergent professional profiles and required skills related to the new jobs generated in different renewable energy sources.

Las medidas de desigualdad tienen como objetivo resumir los desequilibrios distributivos existentes en una población, por lo que resulta conceptualmente deseable que puedan ser derivadas a partir de indicadores de la posición individual de cada uno de los individuos que integran dicha población. Este planteamiento ha llevado a autores como W.G. Runciman (1966) y S. Yitzhaki (1979) a proponer la utilización de índices basados en el concepto de privación relativa.
En este trabajo se propone la medida doble cuadrática como un indicador de desigualdad que puede ser derivado como síntesis de agravios individuales y se estudian sus propiedades. Como complemento empírico se aplica esta medida al estudio de la desigualdad del gasto en España utilizando la información de la Encuesta Continua de Presupuestos Familiares (ECPF) con desagregación por grupos de gasto.

The definition of future scenarios for the regional employment is becoming increasingly important since the European Employment Strategy was launched at the Lisbon Summit (2000) in order to make out of the European Union the world´s most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world.
Since the economic forecasts based on econometric models must be understood as conditional expectations, in this paper we focus on the shift-share model as a useful tool for the definition of scenarios, based on the so called national, sectoral and competitive effects.
Although the most commonly used methodology is based on the “constant shift” and the “constant share” hypotheses, additional options can be considered based on the expected behaviour of the competitive effect, thus leading to more realistic scenarios. Once these new options are developed, the proposed approach is applied to the definition of future scenarios for the regional employment.

The processing of economic series with structural changes entails many difficulties, referred to their stationarity analysis and their univariate modeling. In this paper we study some of the limitations of the stationarity analysis around a constant level when the considered time series is affected by a change in its mean.
Due to these limitations a modified test is proposed, allowing the study of the hypothesis of stationarity around a level affected by an exogenous change. The proposed test (KPSSM) is analysed under different situations showing a suitable behaviour.
An empirical application of the KPSSM test is also included, studying the monthly series of the nominal exchange rate between the French franc and the Danish kroner.

An increasing number of sources provides forecasts about Spanish economic growth, suggesting the convenience of summarizing all these forecasts through some mechanism of combination.
In this paper we develop a new procedure of combination whose weights approach the quality of individual predictions. More specifically, we use the principle of Maximization of the Entropy for the Shannon and quadratic entropy measures, using the available empirical evidence to compare the combined forecasts using these weights with those related to the arithmetic mean.

In this study a measure of inequality is presented: the double quadratic measure, which could be obtained from two indicators of the family of additively decomposable inequality measures characterized by D. Zagier (1983).
The double quadratic measure can be considered as a ...In this study a measure of inequality is presented: the double quadratic measure, which could be obtained from two indicators of the family of additively decomposable inequality measures characterized by D. Zagier (1983).
The double quadratic measure can be considered as a synthesis of individual inequality indicators. It is very sensitive to inequality and fulfils the main properties considered as desirable to those inequality indicators.
As an empiric complement this measure is applied to the study of the inequality of expenditure in Spain using information from the Household Budget Continuous Survey with disgregation in expenditure groups.

One of the most significant economic trends of recent years is the growing use of the Internet for conducting business, and in particular to purchase and sell online without temporal or spatial restrictions. In this context the aim of this paper is to explore both the adoption of e-commerce and the extent of its use across EU-27 firms. We analyze in parallel the factors driving online buying and selling. The intensity of adoption is
examined by looking at the percentage of sales and purchases, respectively, made online. Our results show that the decision to adopt e-commerce depends mainly on the perceived impact ICT adoption would have for the firm. Furthermore, size, absorptive capacity, market environment, and competitive pressures are positively correlated with adoption. Our results also throw some light on the cross-country diffusion of ecommerce.
The substantial differences in adoption rates are mainly explained by income levels. In addition, countries that are more open to trade tend toward higher e-commerce diffusion.