During recent years, Spain has experienced an important revolution in its migration flows. With the 2008–2013 Spanish financial crisis, the model of economic growth that attracted a large number of foreign people disappeared, and the entry of immigrants for reasons other than economic issues gained relevance. Linked with this phenomenon are the new patterns of locational choice across provinces and the variation in the nature of immigrants. In this paper, we examine the differential patterns and drivers of immigration across Spanish regions before and after the financial crisis. Special attention is paid to the question of how the characteristics of individual migrants influence their locational preferences. To answer this question, we use the Dirichlet multinomial regression model. The results obtained show a sharp change in the locational patterns of Spanish immigrants after the economic recession, confirming that traditional economic incentives are less relevant, while non-economic factors linked with a better lifestyle gain importance. They also reveal that, regardless of the economic conditions, network effects are strong. Finally, and what is probably more important for us, our estimates support the hypothesis that the locational preferences rely on the interaction between the immigrants’ characteristics and the underlying locational features.

Grounded in the general equilibrium framework of regional adjustment models, this paper studies how the spatial distribution of sectoral employment can affect the intra-regional spatial location of a population, and so affect territorial development. Although spatial interactions, spatial heterogeneity and sectoral heterogeneity have been introduced in these models, no empirical studies reveal how spatio-sectoral heterogeneity affects the intra-regional distribution of population and jobs. This paper explores this effect through a complex set of interdependencies among the regional population, employment in the regional economic sectors and their respective regional neighbours within the different regional typologies (urban, semi-urban and rural areas), as suggested by the concept of proximity developed by Torre in 2019. We use a system of simultaneous equations to focus on the phenomenon of rural depopulation for the 542 municipalities of the Valencian region of Spain. The results provide evidence for the relevance of spatio-sectoral dynamics, suggesting that reversing depopulation in rural areas depends strongly on the services sector.