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The natural experiment provided by the opening of a section that completed the A8 motorway in Mariña de Lugo, a rural area in Galicia (Spain), offers an opportunity to identify whether spread or backwash effects in economic activity are observed. The new section directly affects only a small strip of the territory—where the transition from the inland rural areas to the more dynamic coastal area takes place. This allows us to test a separate dual inner‐coastal socio‐economic performance after the opening of the new road—an analysis that has rarely been performed for rural areas in developed countries. We study the impact over population growth, employment and business financial results, using the differences‐in‐differences approach. The results we obtain are consistent with the spread hypothesis for the nearest municipality to the new road section, while the spread effects did not disseminate to the neighbouring municipalities. These global results hide a different performance at the sector level, positive for transport and manufacturing companies, and negative for retail firms and hospitality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study provides a case example, referred to the county of Valdeorras (Galicia, Spain), to analyse different alternatives of public investment for sustainable mobility in rural areas. First, we develop a transport model based on gravity models to obtain commuting-to-work patterns, means of transport and routes, calibrating the results with the patterns observed according to different sources. Then, we make our own projections ten years ahead on population growth, geographical distribution, and employment rates, to obtain two scenarios on future trends. In a third step, we analyse different alternatives for public policy targets on sustainable mobility using a multi-criteria approach. The costs of implementing the mobility actions are compared against two potential benefits: 1. a higher integration among the villages that conform the dynamic axis of the area, and of these with their rural hinterland; 2. reducing the environmental impact –in terms of fuel consumption levels. The mobility alternatives are compared following a simple Analytic Hierarchy Process. The analysis helps to identify the potential benefits of exploiting a currently underutilised railroad facility in the area of study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The depopulation process of rural areas in Europe during the last decades is widespread. However, in many regions, this performance is largely an inheritance from past migration and the drag it causes in terms of an ageing population structure. Removing the inertial effects of past migration, we may find a much greater diversity in the current demographic dynamics of rural areas. We analyse the case of Galicia, a NUTS-2 region in Spain that represents a paradigmatic case of traditional emigration. We remove the drag from past migration to obtain the population performance of rural counties once the effects of that inertia were removed, and interpret the results. The analysis works as a descriptive tool: refined data help to identify which rural areas, however they continue to lose population, are being able to slow down or even revert the processes of depopulation inherited from the past. Finally, we explore possible explanations for such better performance, verifying that this is mainly related to key factors in regional planning and development such as the proximity to urban nodes and the quality of connections. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We examine the interaction between a firm that uses either a dirty or a clean technology to produce a product over two periods, 1 and 2, and an environmentally conscious regulator that chooses the environmental tax/subsidy policy. The regulator ignores with which technology the firm manufactures the product and only has a prior belief about it. In this context, if the regulator can credibly commit to the policy for both periods, social welfare is generally higher than if it cannot commit, because distortions in firm's production at period 1 for signalling purposes strongly reduces the optimality of an environmental policy of short duration. A period-by-period policy in which the regulator does not commit to the policy terms for period 2 (which will be contingent to information provided by the firm in period 1) is only optimal when clean technology is very expensive to produce with it and the regulator's environmental concern is not very high. The results highlight the importance of taking into account the time horizon in policymaking, as well as the limitations of regulatory policies that seek to elicit information about the type of technology used by firms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]