Nas últimas quatro décadas, em especial, o meio rural brasileiro vem apresentando uma nova dinâmica em sua população e atividades, o que gera uma nova configuração. Esta nova configuração pode ser observada com relação à ocupação das pessoas no meio rural, com queda do número de pessoas ocupadas em atividades agrícolas com residência no meio rural no século XXI. Observando a nova configuração do meio rural para os estados de São Paulo, Paraná, Mato Grosso do Sul, Mato do Grosso e Goiás, observa-se que os mesmos têm apresentado os fenômenos acima citados. Entretanto, a dinâmica da ocupação do meio rural no Brasil não ocorre de forma homogênea. Isto posto, busca-se, através desta tese, analisar a distribuição e os determinantes da intensidade agrícola no meio rural dos municípios do estado de São Paulo, Paraná, Mato Grosso do Sul, Mato Grosso e Goiás para os anos de 2000 e 2010. Através da análise fatorial foram gerados três indicadores (representados pelos escores fatorais dos fatores extraídos) a saber: o indicador de ruralidade, da agriculturalização (intensidade das atividades agrícolas no meio rural) e da renda não agrícola. Analisando a distribuição espacial destes indicadores, representados pelos escores fatorais dos fatores extraídos, foi constatado que a ruralidade pouco se alterou entre os anos de 2000 e 2010. Também foi observado um aumento na intensidade das atividades agrícolas no meio rural e da renda não agrícola nos municípios pertencentes aos estados do Mato Grosso do Sul e Mato Grosso entre os dois anos analisados. Foram encontradas diferentes associações dos escores fatoriais ruralidade, agriculturalização e renda não agrícola. Levando a conclusão de que não existe um único padrão de evolução e associação entre ruralidade, agriculturalização e renda não agrícola nos estados analisados nos anos de 2000 e 2010. Por meio da análise exploratória de dados espaciais, constatou-se a presença de clusters espaciais Alto-Alto e Baixo-Baixo nas fronteiras dos estados e que a intensidade das atividades agrícolas do município i sofre influência das atividades agrícolas dos municípios vizinhos. A partir desse resultado, buscou-se estimar os determinantes da intensidade das atividades agrícolas no meio rural, utilizando os conceitos de variáveis de primeira e de segunda natureza, e empregando a econometria espacial. Os resultados das estimativas indicam a presença do efeito transbordamento, ou seja, um alto valor na variável intensidade das atividades agrícolas nos municípios vizinhos, aumenta o valor dessa variável no município i e que as variáveis valor total do crédito agrícola para custeio, valor da produção agrícola dividido pela área explorada, área explorada dividida pela área total dos estabelecimentos agropecuários, área não agrícola e distância do município até a capital estadual possuem relevância para explicar a intensidade das atividades agrícolas no meio rural dos estados analisados. Entretanto, as variáveis área explorada dividida pela área dos estabelecimentos agropecuários, distância do município até à capital estadual e área não agrícola são as mais importantes para determinar a agriculturalização dos municípios, indicando que a intensidade das atividades agrícolas nos municípios está mais ligada a eficácia do uso da terra. / In the last four decades, in particular, the Brazilian countryside has been showing a new dynamic in its population and activities, which leads to a new configuration. This new setting can be observed with respect to the occupation of the people in rural areas, with fall of the number of persons employed in agricultural activities with rural residence in the 21th century. Noting the new rural setting to the states of São Paulo, Paraná, Mato Grosso do Sul, Mato Grosso and Goiás, noted that they have presented the aforementioned phenomena. However, the dynamics of rural occupation in Brazil does not occur homogeneously. That said, we seek to, through this thesis, analyzing the distribution and determinants of agricultural intensity in rural areas of the municipalities of the State of São Paulo, Paraná, Mato Grosso do Sul, Mato Grosso and Goias for the years 2000 and 2010. Through factor analysis were generated three indicators (represented by fatorais scores of factors extracted) namely: the indicator of rurality, the agriculturalização (intensity of agricultural activities in rural areas) and of non-agricultural income. Analyzing the spatial distribution of these indicators, represented by fatorais scores of factors extracted, it has been found that the rurally little changed between the years 2000 and 2010. Was also observed an increase in the intensity of agricultural activities in rural areas and non-agricultural income in the municipalities belonging to the states of Mato Grosso do Sul and Mato Grosso among the two years analyzed. Different associations have been found of factorials, agriculturalização and rurality scores income non-agricultural.Leading to the conclusion that there is no single pattern of evolution and association between rurality, agriculturalização and non-agricultural income in the states examined in the years 2000 and 2010. Through the exploratory analysis of spatial data, it was found the presence of clusters High-High and Low-Low spatial-bass on borders and states that the intensity of agricultural activities of the municipality i suffer influence of agricultural activities of neighboring municipalities. From this result, sought to estimate the determinants of the intensity of agricultural activities in rural areas, using the concepts of variables and nature, and employing spatial Econometrics. The results of the estimates indicate the presence of spillover effect, i.e., a high value in the variable intensity of agricultural activities in the neighboring municipalities, increases the value of this variable in the municipality i and that the total value of the agricultural credit variables for costing, value of agricultural production divided by the area explored, exploited area divided by the total area of agricultural establishments, non-agricultural area and distance from the municipality to the State capital have relevance to explain the intensity of agricultural activities in rural areas of the states examined. However, the variables explored area divided by the area of agricultural establishments, away from the municipality to the state capital and non-agricultural area are the most important to determine the agriculturalização of the municipalities, indicating that the intensity of agricultural activities in the municipalities ir more on the effectiveness of land use.

<p>While competition among companies tends to be beneficial for the general public, this is not necessarily the case for competition among governments. Key in the fiscal competition theory is that the mobility of firms and households yields incentives for governments to aim to improve their relative position through successive undercutting of tax rates and welfare state arrangements. This mechanism has the potential to work as a disciplining device because it ensures that no jurisdiction is allowed to be grossly inefficient, because if it were grossly inefficient, mobile factors of production would move away. The main concern in the theoretical fiscal competition literature, however, has been that fiscal competition lowers government spending below their efficient levels. Another concern related to fiscal competition is that household mobility is likely to undermine attempts by governments to redistribute income. Empirical evaluation of both the existence and consequences of fiscal competition is the central topic of the thesis “An Empirical Analysis of Decentralization, Fiscal Competition and Welfare Policy”. </p><p>A particular focus of this thesis is on fiscal competition in welfare policy. With decentralized responsibility for the welfare benefit system in Norway, theory predicts that local governments will behave strategically in setting their welfare policy in order to avoid becoming ‘welfare magnets’. The key finding in Chapter 2 of this thesis is that Norwegian local governments in fact engage in such a ‘welfare game’. A local government will respond with reducing their welfare benefits when neighboring local governments reduce their welfare benefits. Encouraged by the finding in Chapter 2, Chapter 3 seeks to answer the question: Does Welfare Policy Affect Residential Choices? The analysis shows that Norwegian welfare recipients respond to changes in welfare policy by migrating. Local politicians concern about being to generous compared to their peers seem warranted. The analysis in Chapter 4 evaluates whether strategic interaction among Norwegian local governments in property tax decisions occurs. With limited mobility of the tax base and politically highly visible decisions, we interpret the strategic interaction found to be driven by yardstick competition, rather than competition for a mobile tax base. The final chapter differs from the rest in that it utilizes data from 18 OECD countries. The essay analyzes the effects of decentralization of government on the size and composition of government spending. Since jurisdictions with limited geographic scope (such as local governments) are, in general, more likely to face greater competitive pressures than larger ones (such as countries), it follows that the more fiscally decentralized countries are expected to experience stronger fiscal competition. One of the key findings is that decentralization of taxing powers is associated with less transfer spending, but unrelated to government consumption.</p> / Paper I reprinted with kind permission of Elsevier, Sciencedirect.com

While competition among companies tends to be beneficial for the general public, this is not necessarily the case for competition among governments. Key in the fiscal competition theory is that the mobility of firms and households yields incentives for governments to aim to improve their relative position through successive undercutting of tax rates and welfare state arrangements. This mechanism has the potential to work as a disciplining device because it ensures that no jurisdiction is allowed to be grossly inefficient, because if it were grossly inefficient, mobile factors of production would move away. The main concern in the theoretical fiscal competition literature, however, has been that fiscal competition lowers government spending below their efficient levels. Another concern related to fiscal competition is that household mobility is likely to undermine attempts by governments to redistribute income. Empirical evaluation of both the existence and consequences of fiscal competition is the central topic of the thesis “An Empirical Analysis of Decentralization, Fiscal Competition and Welfare Policy”. A particular focus of this thesis is on fiscal competition in welfare policy. With decentralized responsibility for the welfare benefit system in Norway, theory predicts that local governments will behave strategically in setting their welfare policy in order to avoid becoming ‘welfare magnets’. The key finding in Chapter 2 of this thesis is that Norwegian local governments in fact engage in such a ‘welfare game’. A local government will respond with reducing their welfare benefits when neighboring local governments reduce their welfare benefits. Encouraged by the finding in Chapter 2, Chapter 3 seeks to answer the question: Does Welfare Policy Affect Residential Choices? The analysis shows that Norwegian welfare recipients respond to changes in welfare policy by migrating. Local politicians concern about being to generous compared to their peers seem warranted. The analysis in Chapter 4 evaluates whether strategic interaction among Norwegian local governments in property tax decisions occurs. With limited mobility of the tax base and politically highly visible decisions, we interpret the strategic interaction found to be driven by yardstick competition, rather than competition for a mobile tax base. The final chapter differs from the rest in that it utilizes data from 18 OECD countries. The essay analyzes the effects of decentralization of government on the size and composition of government spending. Since jurisdictions with limited geographic scope (such as local governments) are, in general, more likely to face greater competitive pressures than larger ones (such as countries), it follows that the more fiscally decentralized countries are expected to experience stronger fiscal competition. One of the key findings is that decentralization of taxing powers is associated with less transfer spending, but unrelated to government consumption. / Paper I reprinted with kind permission of Elsevier, Sciencedirect.com

Organized Industrial Zones (OIZs) are used as a main and important industry policy tool in Turkey. In 2012, the number of OIZs is 263 with 148 active and 115 planned ones. Network between the firms reveal the knowledge spillovers which is inevitable for economic growth of a country for neo-classical economists. In this thesis, existence of intra-OIZ and intra-industry knowledge spillovers in Ankara and Istanbul is tested by the help of an export decision function. As it considers the spatial dependence between the regional units the spatial econometric method is preferred for the analysis. The data set is taken from the &ldquo / Field Research Survey&rdquo / of Small and Medium Enterprises Development Organization (SMEDO). It consists of 62,137 firm level observations from 24 manufacturing industries in 81 provinces between 2004 and 2007. After the cleaning process of the data, 1545 and 1172 observations are left for Ankara and Istanbul, respectively. The results show that the size of the firm (which is proxied by logarithm of total labor), technology (which is proxied by computer usage), organizational proximity and foreign language knowledge of the administrator are the common determinants of export decision for Ankara and Istanbul for both intra-IOZ and intra-industry relations when spatial dependence is not ignored. Besides these variables, in Ankara percentage of high skilled labor is significant while in Istanbul cluster proximity is significant. Moreover, for Ankara while for intra-OIZ relations the spatial effect is one third of the total effect, it is one fourth of the total effect for intra-industry relation. For Istanbul one fourth of the total effect is from spatial effects for both intra-OIZ and intra-industry relations.

The thesis consists of an introductory part and three self-contained papers. Paper [I] studies the determinants of the differences in expenditure on services for functionally impaired individuals among municipalities in Sweden. A spatial autoregressive model is used in order to test whether the decisions on the expenditure level in a neighboring municipality affect the municipality’s own expenditure. The results show of spatial interaction among neighbors, possible due to mimicking. However, when controlling for differences among counties there is no evidence of spatial interaction. Therefore, the positive interaction first found can be interpreted either as a result of differences in the way county councils diagnose individuals or due to interaction among the neighbors in the same county. Paper [II] takes advantage of a new intergovernmental grant in two ways. First, the grant is used to study the effect on municipal spending related to the grant. Second, the grant is used to test a hypothesis of spatial interaction among municipalities due to mimicking behavior. The data used pertains to the periods before and after the introduction of the grant. A fixed-effects spatial lag model is used to study the spatial interactions among municipalities. The results show that before the grant, municipalities interact with their neighbors when setting the expenditure level, while there is no evidence of interaction in the second period. This would support the hypothesis that the grants provide information to the municipalities and the need for mimicking diminishes with the grant. Paper [III] examines whether local public expenditures on services to functionally impaired individuals crowd out other local public expenditures in Sweden. The hypothesis is tested on five different spending areas using a two-stage least squares (2SLS) fixed-effects model. While the results give no support for crowding out in the areas of social assistance, culture &amp; leisure, and childcare &amp; preschool, a negative relationship on spending for elderly &amp; disabled care and on spending for education is found, suggesting that crowding out indeed occurs within the municipal sector. The negative relationships are significant both in a statistical and an economic sense.

The empirical literature in economic geography has recently dealt with two fundamental questions, whether growth or innovation is spatially bounded or not and how far the economic growth is determined by knowledge. In this thesis, relations between economic growth and knowledge relation is discussed from spatial spillovers perspective with the help of spatial econometric techniques. Adding city-region discussion to the existing literature, the thesis aims to evaluate the economic growth and knowledge spillovers from a broader perspective. The selected cases are two dynamic and rapidly transforming centers, namely izmir and Antalya City-regions and the results suggest the strong relevance of proximity effects and spillovers in both of the cases. Moreover, the analyses show that growth and knowledge spillovers operate in opposite directions rather than a parallel pattern as expected in Knowledge Based Economy discussions.

In this paper we analyse regional growth in Central and Eastern Europe in the second half of the 1990s, a period in which pronounced disparities between a group of catching-up regions and another group of falling back regions appeared. We aim to identify the factors behind a dynamic growth performance and the weaknesses leading to poor growth and thus investigate the role of (foreign) investment, education and innovation as well as geographical factors in a model of economic growth. The key relationships proposed by this model are then estimated with empirical data for the period 1995-2000 using spatial econometric tools. We find that foreign direct investment was paramount for regional growth in that period. EU border regions and capital areas clearly outperformed others. Further, regional growth clusters have appeared. Surprisingly, the high level of secondary education in Eastern European regions played no role with growth. Higher education, in contrast served to facilitate technology transfer. (author's abstract) / Series: EI Working Papers / Europainstitut

Spatial interaction models of the gravity type are used in conjunction with sample data on flows between origin and destination locations to analyse international and interregional trade, commodity, migration and commuting patterns. The focus is on the classical log-normal model version and spatial econometric extensions that have recently appeared in the literature. These new models replace the conventional assumption of independence between origin-destination flows with formal approaches that allow for spatial dependence in flow magnitudes. The paper also discusses problems that arise in applied practice when estimating (log-normal) spatial interaction models. (authors' abstract)

This paper adopts a spatial econometric perspective to analyse regional convergence of per capita income in Europe in 1995 to 2000 and, moreover, relaxes the assumption of a single steady-state growth path which appears to be out of tune with reality of empirical dynamics. The two-club spatial error convergence model with groupwise heteroskedasticity is found to be most appropriate for the data at hand. Two empirical key findings are worthwhile to note. The first is that the data provide much support for unconditional ß-convergence in Europe. The second is that the usual convergence conclusions hold. But they do so for reasons that are not revealed by the classical test equation that is typical in mainstream economics literature. (authors' abstract)

This paper investigates the impact of knowledge capital stocks on total factor productivity through the lens of the knowledge capital model proposed by Griliches (1979), augmented with a spatially discounted cross-region knowledge spillover pool variable. The objective is to shift attention from firms and industries to regions and to estimate the impact of cross-region knowledge spillovers on total factor productivity (TFP) in Europe. The dependent variable is the region-level TFP, measured in terms of the superlative TFP index suggested by Caves, Christensen and Diewert (1982). This index describes how efficiently each region transforms physical capital and labour into output. The explanatory variables are internal and out-of-region stocks of knowledge, the latter capturing the contribution of cross-region knowledge spillovers. We construct patent stocks to proxy regional knowledge capital stocks for N=203 regions over the 1997- 2002 time period. In estimating the effects we implement a spatial panel data model that controls for the spatial autocorrelation due to neighbouring regions and the individual heterogeneity across regions. The findings provide a fairly remarkable confirmation of the role of knowledge capital contributing to productivity differences among regions, and add an important spatial dimension to the discussion, by showing that productivity effects of knowledge spillovers increase with geographic proximity. (authors' abstract)