This article reviews almost four decades of contributions on the subject of supervised regionalization methods. These methods aggregate a set of areas into a predefined number of spatially contiguous regions while optimizing certain aggregation criteria. The authors present a taxonomic scheme that classifies a wide range of regionalization methods into eight groups, based on the strategy applied for satisfying the spatial contiguity constraint. The article concludes by providing a qualitative comparison of these groups in terms of a set of certain characteristics, and by suggesting future lines of research for extending and improving these methods.

Business and consumer surveys have become an essential tool for gathering information about different economic variables. While the fast availability of the results and the wide range of variables covered have made them very useful for monitoring the current state of the economy, there is no consensus on their usefulness for forecasting macroeconomic developments. The objective of this paper is to analyse the possibility of improving forecasts for selected macroeconomic variables for the euro area using the information provided by these surveys. After analyzing the potential presence of seasonality and the issue of quantification, we tested whether these indicators provide useful information for improving forecasts of the macroeconomic variables. With this aim, different sets of models have been considered (AR, ARIMA, SETAR, Markov switching regime models and VAR) to obtain forecasts for the selected macroeconomic variables. Then, information from surveys has been considered for forecasting these variables in the context of the following models: autoregressive, VAR, Markov switching regime and leading indicator models. In all cases, the root mean square error (RMSE) has been computed for different forecast horizons. The comparison of the forecasting performance of the two sets of models permits us to conclude that, in most cases, models that include information from the surveys have lower RMSEs than the best model without survey information. However, this reduction is only significant in a limited number of cases. In this sense, the results obtained extend the results of previous research that has included information from business and consumer surveys to explain the behaviour of macroeconomic variables, but are not conclusive about its role

Due to its ageing population and low birth rates, the European Union (EU) will need to import foreign labour in the next decades. In this context, the EU neighbouring countries (ENC) are the main countries of origin and transit of legal and irregular migration towards Europe. Their economic, cultural, and historical links also make them an important potential source of labour. The objective of this paper is to analyse past and future trends in ENC‐EU bilateral migration relationships. With this aim, we specify and estimate a gravity model for nearly 200 countries between 1960 and 2010. Next, we use the model to obtain medium‐run migration forecasts. Our results show a clear increase in migratory pressures from ENC to the EU in the near future, but probably lower than initially expected.

Background: The past two decades have been marked by impressive growth in the migration of medical doctors. The medical profession is among the most mobile of highly skilled professions, particularly in Europe, and is also the sector that experiences the most serious labour shortages. However, surprisingly little is known about how medical doctors choose their destinations. In addition, the literature is scarce on the factors determining the sharp rise in the migration of doctors from Africa, Asia and Eastern and Southeastern Europe, and how the last economic crisis has shaped the migration flows of health professionals. Methods: We use the new module on health worker migration provided by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) for 2000–2016 in order to examine the channels through which OECD countries attract foreign physicians from abroad. We estimate a gravity model using the Pseudo-Poisson Maximum Likelihood estimator. Results: Our results reveal that a lower unemployment rate, good remuneration of physicians, an aging population, and a high level of medical technology at the destination are among the main drivers of physicians’ brain drain. Furthermore, an analysis of the mobility of medical doctors from a number of regions worldwide shows that individuals react differently on a country-wise basis to various determinants present in the destination countries. Physicians from African countries are particularly attracted to destination countries offering higher wages, and to those where the density of medical doctors is relatively low. Concurrently, a higher demand for healthcare services and better medical technology in the receiving country drives the inflow of medical doctors from Central and Eastern Europe, while Asian doctors seem to preferentially migrate to countries with better school systems. Conclusions: This study contributes to a deeper understanding of the channels through which OECD countries attract foreign medical doctors from abroad. We find that, apart from dyadic factors, a lower unemployment rate, good remuneration of physicians, an aging population, and good medical infrastructure in the host country are among the main drivers of physicians’ brain drain. Furthermore, we find that utility from migration to specific countries may be explained by the heterogeneity of origin countries.

This article examines the occupational mobility of immigrants between their countries of origin and Spain on the basis of one of the few surveys available internationally with longitudinal information on immigrant employment in home and host countries. The evidence shows that the occupational status of immigrants in the Spanish labour market is, in general, substantially worse than in their countries of origin. The severe loss of occupational status experienced by immigrants is explained by the combined effect of the intense initial downgrading they experience when entering the Spanish labour market and their very slow occupational progress during their stay in Spain. These findings are more in line with the segmented assimilation theory, which suggests a limited or blocked immigrant occupational mobility, than with the assimilation theory, which predicts a U shaped evolution in the occupational status of immigrants between their home and host countries. As a result, the Spanish case contrasts sharply with previous evidence for other advanced countries, which tends to support the assimilation perspective. Finally, the empirical evidence suggests that one of the elements impeding the occupational mobility of immigrants in Spain is the significant size of the secondary segment of the labour market, which restricts immigrants’ opportunities mainly to low-status occupations.

This paper analyses the differential impact of human capital, in terms of different levels of schooling, on regional productivity and convergence. The potential existence of geographical spillovers of human capital is also considered by applying spatial panel data techniques. The empirical analysis of Spanish provinces between 1980 and 2007 confirms the positive impact of human capital on regional productivity and convergence, but reveals no evidence of any positive geographical spillovers of human capital. In fact, in some specifications the spatial lag presented by tertiary studies has a negative effect on the variables under consideration. Copyright (c) 2010 the author(s). Journal compilation (c) 2010 RSAI.