Creixement i Convergència Regional a Espanya i Europa

Resum

Regional policies in the supply of public goods can have a significant impact on regional disequality in Europe. In the middle or long run, equalisation of the regional supply of public and human capital will reduce regional income dispersion per head approximately be a third. The contributions of education and infrastructure investment to this amount are approximately of the same order of magnitude. Investment priorities implied by various equity and efficiency criteria are quite at variance. It doet not follow that there is allways a conflict between equity and efficiency. This is not the case in the group of regions with a low supply of public capital and un acceptable return to investment. The contribution of infrastructure police to the reduction of regional disequality in Spain during the period analysed has been very small (around 1%). The assignation of FEDER transfers has proven to be clearly a redistributive criterion. The impact of these funds has been considerable, although limited by the small volume of available resources. According to our results, FEDER has reduced dispersion of regional income in Spain, for the most optimistic scenario, around 5%, a figure which represents approximately one third of the total reduction in regional disequality during the decade of the eighties.