Browsing by Subject "Regional differences"

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Decomposing a decomposition
within-country differences and the role of structural change in productivity growth
(2019) Mühlen, Henning; Escobar, Octavio
In this article, we investigate the relevance of structural change in country wide productivity growth considering within-country differences. For this purpose, we propose a two-step decomposition approach that accounts for differences among subnational units. To highlight the relevance of our procedure compared to the prevalent approach in the existing development literature (which usually neglects subnational differences), we show an application with data for the Mexican economy. Specifically, we contrast findings obtained from country-sector data on the one hand with those obtained from (more disaggregated) state-sector data on the other hand. One main insight is that the qualitative and quantitative results differ substantially between the two approaches. Our procedure reveals that structural change appeared to be growth-reducing during the period from 2005 to 2016. We show that this negative effect is driven mainly by the reallocation of (low-skilled) labor within subnational units.
Metropolitan, urban, and rural regions: how regional differences affect elementary school students in Germany
(2025) Schwerter, Jakob; Bleher, Johannes; Doebler, Philipp; McElvany, Nele; Schwerter, Jakob; TU Dortmund University; Bleher, Johannes; University of Hohenheim; McElvany, Nele; TU Dortmund University
This study examined how regional differences affect elementary school students using the representative German Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) 2016 data (N = 3,959 fourth-grade students; M_{Age} = 10.34 years; 49% girls; 71% from a nonimmigrant background) by combining bootstrapping, multiple imputations, principal component analysis, and the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO). Grouping regions into rural, (sub-)urban, and metropolitan, we found that students from rural and metropolitan areas are 10.9% and 15.1% more likely, respectively, to receive an academic track recommendation than their urban counterparts. Similarly, rural and metropolitan students are 0.2 to 0.3 standard deviations more likely to enjoy school and be interested in reading than their urban counterparts. Aside from students’ backgrounds and skills, many of the characteristics explaining this regional difference are structural, directly affected by policy decisions. Variables directly and indirectly influenced by policy help explain regional differences, but nonpolicy variables reduce regional differences in academic track recommendations the most.