A regional development index for Portugal revisited

• Autor(a) principal: Cruz, Manuel João Duarte
• Data de Publicação: 2023
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10071/29731
• topic: Human development index; Regional development and asymmetries; Portugal; Índice de desenvolvimento humano; Desenvolvimento e assimetrias regionais

Whether we consider policymaking at any degree or at the academia, regional development has been an extensive topic for decades. This subject is, perhaps, more important for countries like Portugal, as its chronic problems of regional asymmetries between the littoral and interior regions bring increasingly damaging impacts: while urban coastal pression is faced, desertification of the countryside seems to be unstoppable as well. Moreover, this decade has brought a wide panoply of phenomena: from the increase of public investment in areas that had not been seen as relevant before (e.g., energetic transition) to the new shape of NUTS since 2015, and even the more recent COVID-19 pandemic that alerted us to the significant asymmetries that prevail. We aim to conceptualise regional development, to analyse regional asymmetries in Portugal, and to understand what are its main determinants of regional variability. Gathering data from 2013 to 2021, this study employs a two-step approach: first, it updates a Portuguese Regional Development Index augmented with new governance and environment dimensions, whose results reveal that the new dimensions are of utmost importance for the chronically more depressed regions. Second, it uses our index scores to provide panel data and neural network estimations, whose findings advocate that economic dimensions, such as unemployment and productivity, are key to understand the current picture. As far as we know, this study is the first one to use index calculations, panel data, and neural networks in the study of regional development in Portugal.