TD NEREUS 06-2022
Pedro Henrique Batista de Barros, Gustavo Henrique Leite de Castro and Naercio Menezes-Filho
Agricultural production expansion is an important strategy to encourage structural changes and lead to economic development. However, the increase in the agricultural production can occur in two different ways: through productivity - intensive margin - and through area expansion - extensive margin. Human capital can enhance production both ways, but its effects remain little explored in the literature. This paper aims to investigate the effect of human capital on the increase in agricultural productivity and on the expansion of the agricultural frontiers in Brazil. The results indicate that human capital has a positive effect on these albeit with varying intensities and significant heterogeneities. Human capital affects agricultural productivity more in agricultural frontier regions where there is often a shortage of skilled labor. However, human capital does not affect the expansion of agricultural area in consolidated agricultural regions of the country.
TD NEREUS 05-2022
Eduardo A. Haddad, Inácio F. Araújo, Ademir Rocha and Karina Sass
The Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, scaled up the ongoing conflict in Donbas beyond its regional borders, hindering and halting different aspects of economic life. Considering the internal geography of Ukraine’s economic structure, the damages to physical infrastructure and supply chain disruptions are likely to propagate to other parts of the country through an intricate plot of production and income linkages. From a disaggregated analysis of multiregional and multisectoral linkages, this paper offers a systematic, integrated account of the structural linkages that allows modeling spillovers from one Ukrainian region to another. This approach breaks new ground by highlighting the internal economic effects of the conflict in Ukraine. We develop an interregional input-output system for Ukraine, providing the numerical basis for developing analytical frameworks to support knowledge building in the recovery process of distressed territories during the post-war period. We offer this database to the international scientific community to support modeling projects focusing on structural features of the Ukrainian economy. As shown in our illustrative exercises, understanding the structure of intersectoral and interregional linkages is critical to understanding better the propagation of exogenous shocks in the economy.
TD NEREUS 04-2022
Linnan Yan, Menger Tu, André L. S. Chagas and Lufeng Tai
Existing studies neglected to assess the resource allocation effect of high-speed railway (HSR). This paper examines the impact of HSR on labor spatial misallocation in China by applying a modified spatial difference-in-differences approach, which identify local treatment effect, spillover effect on treated and untreated regions. The study finds: (1) Opening HSR alleviates not only the local labor misallocation but also the misallocation in surrounding areas to a greater extent, including cities with HSR (treatment group) and without HSR (control group), which contributes to the overall productivity increase. The spillover effect of HSR is larger than the direct effect. (2) The largest spillover effect occurs in adjacent areas near 350 km apart, while the spillover effect disappears beyond 500 km. (3) The direction and magnitude of HSR effect depend on the urban scale. For large-scale cities, the impact of opening HSR is greater versus small-scale ones.
TD NEREUS 03-2022
Tomaz Ponce Dentinho
A Ciência Regional tem tratado mais das regiões do que das suas fronteiras assumindo-as usualmente como periferias facilmente conectadas com distância e acessibilidade, mas que evita tratar a função das fronteiras como barreira ou organização do espaço ou mesmo analisar a sua criação que, no caso de fronteiras entre países, são normalmente definidas por guerras e conflitos. A guerra da Rússia com a Ucrânia e a obrigação de pensá-la leva-nos a colocar o desenho e a função das fronteiras na agenda da Ciência Regional. Neste documento de trabalho exploramos a ideia de fronteira como espaço mínimo de proteção de portos de bacias que confluem com o mar, procuramos a sua aplicação à fronteira da Ucrânia, recolhemos percepções da fronteira entre a Moldávia e a Ucrânia, a Roménia e a Ucrânia e, em ambiente de guerra, entre a Ucrânia e a Rússia. Com base numa visita de poucas horas num dia de guerra, intuímos sobre a estratégia de invasão russa e sobre a dualidade entre fronteiras e contrabando. Finalmente argumentamos sobre a urgência de estudar os custos e benefícios das sanções econômicas como arma de guerra e sobre os efeitos de vários cenários de evolução da guerra incluindo a integração da Ucrânia na Europa.
TD NEREUS 02-2022
Eduardo A. Haddad and Inácio F. Araújo
The spurt of data and organized quantitative information from different archaeological sources has challenged established truths about the ancient economy in the last three decades. The range of tools and techniques for exploiting these archaeological sources has also grown dramatically. As a result, new questions are raised, which put our sources in a broader context that increasingly favors the long-term perspective. In this paper, we discuss, using a case study, how the use of numbers can shed light in the study of ancient Roman history, with a particular interest in its economy. Our illustrative exercises focus on the use of regional science approaches, a discipline at the crossroads of economics and geography. Departing from a general equilibrium conceptual framework, we are particularly interested in Sir Alan G. Wilson’s seminal contributions as conducive to our exploration of digital numismatic databases to unravel spatial processes in the ancient world. Deriving from universal laws of physics, we will explore principles of spatial interaction modeling applied to numismatic data for the late Roman Republic that will help understand spatial interaction processes in the ancient Roman economy in the last two centuries BCE. By measuring, mapping, and modeling archaeological observations (i.e., numismatic records), we expect to make sense of patterns in the data formally and to use these insights comparatively and longitudinally, as preconized by different authors.