Factual evidence suggests that ICT-led growth and ICT-producing sectors are strongly localised geographically. Given that the nature of ongoing technological change and innovation dynamics has a strong local/regional component, public policies need to be designed at this level as well. However,...

Using new sectoral data on investment and capital services we carry out a growth accounting exercise on Spain 1985-2002. We compute the contribution to output and labour productivity growth of employment, non-ICT and ICT capital, labour qualification and Total Factor Productivity. Results are...

This article analyses the role of the new technologies in the competitiveness of Spanish industry. We exclude the energy factor and focus our attention on the impact of the ICT capital services (hardware, software and telecommunications)on the productivity of the manufacturing sectors, as well...

The paper presents a quantification of Spanish productivity performance over the last two decades –with a special mention to the role played by Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). It makes use of the capital service data -recently released by the BBVA Foundation- exploiting its...

This article explores the Spanish relative position in terms of exposure to Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and its impact on economic growth over the last decade. It shows a wide set of indicators reflecting a technological gap of the country. This lag is more intensive in its...

Using new sectoral data on Spanish capital stock, real investment and credit we check for the presence of bank preferences for lending to particular branches of the economy. We show that these subsectors share specific characteristics in the levels and components of their cost of use of capital....

The paper revises the impact of infrastructures and Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) on economic growth. It takes Spain as a reference case due to the accessibility to capital services estimates. The Spanish database allows the measurement of the impact on growth of three ICT...

This paper focuses on the influence of two classical engines of population agglomeration: geography versus history. Geography is identified by two co-ordinates: coastal position and altitude. The prominence of history is captured also by two characteristics: the initial size of the...

This paper proposes two considerations prior to the study of city size and emphasizes their importance in the testing of one of the empirical regularities most widely used by the literature, Zipf’s law. The first one refers to the importance of using a consistent database for analysis. The...

This short paper examines the evolution of the population density in Spain during the 20th century. Using a homogeneous database of the population at a municipal level – elaborated from the eleven censuses carried out between 1900 and 2001– the paper looks at the general characteristics of...