José María Mella-Márquez, Department of Economic Structure and Development Economics, Madrid, Spain, Coro Chasco-Yrigoyen, Department of Applied Economics
Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Madrid, Spain
EXTERNALITIES AND URBAN CONVERGENCE IN SPAIN - A SPATIAL ECONOMETRIC APPROACH (assigned to theme
The study of economic urban growth has not a long tradition in Spain. In other analysis, we improved the knowledge of the Spanish urban system. We found a convergence trend in a sample of main cities and two city clubs with different convergence speeds. In this paper we test these results with a bigger spatial sample (722 cities with 73% of total Spanish population) and time period (1985-2002). Our aim is to determine the factors that explain urban growth and observe the Spanish cities situation in terms of “winners” and “losers” after the long period of integration of Spain in the EU. A spatial conditional b-convergence equation is specified and the classic problems of spread and backwash are studied by including a spatial autoregressive term and spatial regimes –convergence clubs- in the growth model.
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