Ana Jesus Lopez-Menendez

University of Oviedo | UNIOVI · Department of Applied Economics

The aim of this paper is to contribute both theoretically and empirically to the study of Inequality of Opportunity in Spain. The analysis is carried out using microdata collected by the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC), which incorporate a wide variety of personal harmonised variables, allowing comparability with...

Environmental sustainability was established by the United Nations as a Millennium Development Goal (MDG7), including a wide variety of targets referred to the access to safe drinking water, the reduction of biodiversity loss, the improvement of lives of slum dwellers and the integration of principles of sustainable development into the country pol...

As more and more daily activities take place online, data on internet behaviour is becoming a key information source. In this sense, several papers have explored the usefulness of internet search data in order to improve the nowcasting and forecasting of economic indicators. Special attention has been paid to predicting unemployment. Nonetheless, m...

The analysis of different economic situations and risk factors is necessary in order to define forecasting scenarios properly. The paper focuses on the shift-share model as a useful tool in the definition of scenarios, based on the different components contributing to the change of a given economic variable (national, sectoral and competitive effec...

The study of inequality of opportunity and its main drivers is a major task in the field of economics. This paper aims to estimate a comprehensive database of socio-economic variables for five African countries (Ethiopia, Ghana, Uganda, Malawi, and Nigeria) using imputation techniques, with the ultimate goal of approximating the degrees of intergen...

Family background characteristics and educational resources are crucial in shaping individuals’ income and therefore a potential source of income inequality and inequality of opportunity. This article analyses inequalities in the Spanish diverse regions using data from the European Survey of Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC). Along this articl...

Background: The devastating health and economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic led to a global response in the development of effective vaccines to fight the disease in an extraordinarily short time. Both the development and the production of these vaccines opened a path of hope, but the inequality in vaccine distribution raises great concerns ab...

Immigration has been identified as one of the most prominent political problems in Europe, whose relevance has increased since the outbreak of the COVID pandemic. In order to gain greater understanding of this crucial issue it is advisable to complement the use of objective indicators with subjective information based on perceptions, thus reflectin...

ECINEQ Working Paper http://www.ecineq.org/milano/WP/ECINEQ2021-595.pdf The COVID-19 pandemic opens up a wide range of interesting issues related, on the one hand, to the causes that have facilitated its expansion and, on the other, to the measures that can mitigate its effects. The aim of this work is to perform an analysis of the impact of the CO...

In this paper, we provide an analysis of inequalities and opportunities within European countries. For this purpose, we use microdata from 26 European countries collected using the European Union Survey on Income and Living Conditions. This instrument includes harmonised variables to guarantee comparability across countries. Our analysis aims to de...

The aim of this paper is to shed some light on the behaviour of Inequality of Opportunity (IOp henceforth) in developing countries. The analysis is carried out using microdata collected by national surveys and harmonised by the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS). The LIS database incorporates a wide variety of personal harmonised variables, which allow...

The information theory developed by Shannon defines the entropy for any probabilistic system as a measure of the related uncertainty. The contributions to this Special Issue "Entropy Application for Forecasting" show the enormous potential of entropy and information theory in forecasting, including both theoretical developments and empirical applic...

The aim of this article is to analyze inequality and inequality of opportunity (IOp) for the Spanish regions Autnomous Communities (CCAA), paying main attention to the situation of foreign immigrants. For this purpose, we use the European Social Survey of Income and Living Conditions database and some variables regarding individuals' perceptions ab...

The aim of this paper is to analyse mobility and inequalities in the Spanish regions (CCAA) using data of the European Survey of Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC). Along this paper we try to answer three main questions. Firstly, we focus on mobility in education to see if parental background affects the educational attainment of individuals. S...

Este libro es resultado de un trabajo desarrollado durante los últimos años y surge motivado por tres convicciones fundamentales. La primera es la necesidad de formar individuos capaces de analizar e interpretar el funcionamiento de la economía, trabajando competencias relacionadas con la Econometría, como la capacidad de análisis y síntesis, la r...

The aim of this article is to shed some light on the behaviour of income inequality and inequality of opportunity over time for 26 European countries. The analysis is carried out using microdata collected by the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC), which incorporate a wide variety of personal harmonised variables...

The role of uncertainty has become increasingly important in economic forecasting, due to both theoretical and empirical reasons. Although the traditional practice consisted of reporting point predictions without specifying the attached probabilities, uncertainty about the prospects deserves increasing attention, and recent literature has tried to...

The aim of this chapter is to shed some light on the behavior of Income Inequality and Inequality of Opportunity over time for 26 European countries. The analysis is carried out using microdata collected by the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC), which incorporates a wide variety of personal harmonized variables, al...

The aim of this paper is to contribute both theoretically and empirically to the analysis of Inequality of Opportunity over time, providing some significant findings referred to the Spanish case. The analysis is carried out using microdata collected by the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC), which incorporate a wide...

Training individuals capable of analysing, understanding and explaining the functioning of the economy is a big challenge for Schools of Economics and Business. In this context, Econometrics can be considered as a strategic tool, providing competences referred to the ability to search, process and analyse information, and identify, pose and solve p...

The aim of this paper is to shed some light on the behaviour of Inequality of Opportunity (IOp) in developing countries. The analysis is carried out using microdata collected by national surveys and harmonised by the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS). The LIS database incorporates a wide variety of personal harmonised variables, which allow us to made...

In many of his writings, lectures and talks Pedro Gil emphasized the wide variety of economic applications of Information Theory. In this paper, as a tribute to him, we aim to provide some insight into this topic, mainly referred to income inequality, industrial concentration and economic forecasting.

Economic issues have been a major concern for Europeans in the last few years. In this context, it is reasonable to suppose that people are aware of the main economic figures regarding Europe. But are they really familiar with them? Do they know what the rates of growth, unemployment and inflation are? The aim of this article is to explore the leve...

In the context of the Economics and Business degrees, Econometrics provide a wide variety of tools which appear to be narrowly related to several main competences such as information management, creativity, problem solving or decision-making. Furthermore, the need of analyzing and interpreting the functioning of the economy suggests the convenience...

In the framework of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, a list of 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) has been approved connecting the issues of multidimensional poverty, inequality and exclusion, and sustainability. Seven of these goals are referred to environmental sustainability, thus significantly increasing the weight assigned to t...

The aim of this paper is to shed some light on the behaviour of income inequality and Inequality of Opportunity over time for 26 European countries. The analysis is carried out using micro-data collected by the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC), which incorporate a wide variety of personal harmonised variables, all...

Economic and financial time series are widely considered as one of the most challenging applications of modeling and forecasting. The increasing in forecasting availability and the controversial debate about the advantages of alternative forecasting procedures suggest the need of further research on the forecasting evaluation metrics. In this conte...

La predicción económica es una actividad tan apasionante como controvertida. A pesar del consenso generalizado sobre su necesidad, existe un amplio debate sobre la idoneidad de las técnicas y métodos para elaborar predicciones, las medidas para evaluar su precisión e incluso el papel que los organismos de prospectiva deben desempeñar en un entorno...

La pregunta ¿desigualdad de qué? formulada por el premio Nobel de Economía Amartya Sen en la Tanner Lecture on Human Values (1980) ha estado presente en los análisis distributivos abordados por los investigadores sociales desde distintas ópticas. Según Dworkin (1981), Arneson (1989) y Cohen (1989), la justicia requiere que todos los factores que in...

Economic issues have been a major concern for Europeans in the last few years. In this context, it is reasonable to think that people would be aware of the main economic figures. But, do they really know them? Do they know the rates of GDP, unemployment or inflation? The aim of this paper is to explore the level of knowledge of these three key econ...

In the context of Economics and Business degrees, Econometrics provide a wide variety of tools which appear to be narrowly related to several main competences such as information management, creativity, problem solving or decision-making. Furthermore, the need of analyzing and interpreting the functioning of the economy suggests the convenience of...

La elaboración de nuevas medidas de bienestar y calidad de vida constituye un reto tan apasionante como complejo. En el actual contexto socioeconómico, distintas iniciativas internacionales recogen la necesidad de disponer de indicadores capaces de reflejar las distintas dimensiones del bienestar humano, a partir de información tanto cuantitativa c...

Schools of Economics and Business face the challenge of training individuals capable of analysing, understanding and explaining the functioning of the economy. With this aim, Statistics and Econometrics can be considered as strategic tools, providing competences referred to the ability to search, process and analyse information, and identify, pose...

Resumen: Los impactos medioambientales del crecimiento económico han sido puestos de manifiesto en un buen número de informes, que sugieren la necesidad de adoptar actuaciones encaminadas a integrar los principios de desarrollo sostenible en las políticas de los distintos países. Este es el caso de los Objetivos del Milenio de Naciones Unidas, que...

This paper provides empirical evidence referred to environmental forecasting, including the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) and the Environmental Logistic Curve (ELC). More specifically, we estimate country environmental logistic curves from a world database, combining different procedures as Verhulst’s, Pearl’s and Nonlinear Least Squares. From...

In the last few years the term “big data” has gained popularity in order to refer to the vast amount of digital data which information and communication technologies are making possible to gather, store, diffuse and share in unprecedented ways. Economists have started to explore the potential of the “big data” coming from online search behaviour si...

This paper analyses the normalised Locally Best Invariant statistic for testing the null hypothesis of stationarity around a level, showing its divergence when applied to series with a shift in its mean. This fact suggests an extension of the test allowing the study of stationarity around a level with an exogenous change. The characteristic functio...

The development of the Information Society involves the apparition of the so-called "digital divide" which, according to the OECD (2001), "refers to the gap between individuals, households, businesses and geographic areas at different socio-economic levels with regard both to their opportunities to access information and communication technologies...

European universities are currently faced with the challenge of becoming a world quality reference by 2010, as agreed at the European Councils of Lisbon (2000) and Barcelona (2002). Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), when used effectively, can help to achieve this objective, by improving the flexibility and quality of learning and fa...

A medida que las nuevas tecnologías de la información y la comunicación se han ido difundiendo se han producido importantes cambios en el ámbito económico y social. Tales cambios han repercutido asimismo sobre los espacios educativos, en los que se ha comenzado a aplicar estas tecnologías en sus métodos de enseñanza-aprendizaje, surgiendo así el de...

The aim of this work is to analyze the influence of the spatial effects in the evolution of the regional employment, thus improving the explanation of the existing differences. With this aim, two non-parametric techniques are proposed: spatial shift-share analysis and spatial filtering. Spatial shift-share models allow the identification and estima...

The celebration of the International Year of Statistics in 2013 provides a good opportunity for emphasizing the role of statistical tools in the current lives and also for sharing professional experiences in a wide variety of fields. Focusing on the framework of Higher Education, Statistics and Econometrics have become increasingly important in sev...

In this study we present an analytical approach to the growth-inequality relationship, adopting as a reference the Kuznets'inverted U. With this aim we consider not only the most common measures, but also new indicators based on the information theory: the quadratic and the double quadratic measures. The polynomic functions related to these measure...

RESUMEN El sector energético está experimentando transformaciones sustanciales como consecuencia del desarrollo de las energías renovables, cuyo impulso no sólo aporta beneficios ambientales, sino que también reduce la dependencia energética y contribuye a la creación de empleo. En este trabajo realizamos un análisis prospectivo del empleo en el...

The relationship between income inequality and economic growth has been widely studied,leading to a controversial debate. Regarding the effect of economic growth on inequality, Kuznets’ inverted- U hypothesis (1955) suggests that inequality first rises with growth and then falls after a turning point. This model has been extended by Anand and Kanbu...

One of the most significant economic trends of recent years is the growing use of the Internet for conducting business, and in particular to purchase and sell online without temporal or spatial restrictions. In this context the aim of this paper is to explore both the adoption of e-commerce and the extent of its use across EU-27 firms. We analyze i...

According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), Green Growth means "Fostering economic growth and development, while ensuring that natural assets continue to provide the resources and environmental services on which our well-being relies". Furthermore, since Sustainable Development provides an important context for Gr...

This paper explores the use of a maximum entropy econometric approach to combine forecasts when the small amount of information available does not allow the use of regression procedures since a dimensionality problem arises. This approach has its roots in information theory and builds on the entropy information measures and the classical maximum en...

1 <anaj@uniovi.es>, 2 <rigo@uniovi.es> Resumen En este trabajo resumimos nuestra experiencia de movilidad virtual en el ámbito del Campus Virtual Compartido del Grupo G9 (CVC-G9) que se inició en el curso 1999/2000 con la asignatura "Análisis de Datos Económicos" y previsiblemente finalizará en los próximos años, al completarse la implantación de l...

The relationship between income inequality and economic growth has been widely studied, leading to a controversial debate. Regarding the effect of economic growth on inequality, Kuznets' inver-ted-U hypothesis (1955) suggests that inequality first rises with growth and then falls after a turning point. This model has been extended by Anand and Kanb...

La utilización de software libre y abierto (FOSS) aporta numerosas ventajas en el ámbito universitario, que resultan aún más patentes en el marco del Espacio Europeo de Educación Superior (EEES). Las principales características del FOSS (libertad de uso de programas, acceso al código fuente, estudio y adaptación, distribución de copias e implementa...

The European Union electricity market has been gradually liberalized since 1990s. Theoretically, competitive markets should lead to efficiency gains in the economy thus reducing electricity prices. However, there is a controversial debate about the real effects of the electricity liberalization on electricity prices. Moreover, the increased generat...

El análisis de los desequilibrios distributivos exige instrumentos adecuados de medida, que permitan analizar el cumplimiento de las metas establecidas en los Objetivos del Milenio de Naciones Unidas o la Estrategia Europa 2020. En este trabajo describimos los principales indicadores de desigualdad y pobreza, analizando su interpretación y dificult...

The establishment of the new university degrees, adapted to the European Higher Education Area (EHEA), provides an interesting “inflection point” to present an overview of our teaching experiences, thus extracting some useful conclusions for the current and future challenges. With this aim, this paper summarizes our two-decade experiences in Econom...

The need to establish a more complete and far-reaching Europe, strengthening its intellectual, cultural, social, scientific and technological dimensions was emphasized in the Bologna Declaration, signed by the European Ministers of Education in 1999. Since then, European universities have been involved in the development of the so-called European H...

“Introducción a la Estadística Económica” es un texto que se adapta a la asignatura del mismo nombre incluida en el primer curso de los grados de Economía, Administración y Dirección de Empresas, Contabilidad y Finanzas y Relaciones Laborales y Recursos Humanos de la Universidad de Oviedo. A lo largo de doce temas presentamos de forma sencilla pero...

In this paper we have analyzed the adoption of information and communication technologies (ICT) across 216 regions in 30 European countries -the 27 member states of the European Union plus two candidate countries, Croatia and Iceland, and Norway-. Data has been analyzed along two dimensions (individual indicators and territories) by means of princi...

Este libro se estructura en un total 10 capítulos agrupados en tres partes, dedicadas respectivamente a Probabilidad (capítulos 1 a 4), Inferencia Estadística (capítulos 5 a 9) e Introducción a la Econometría (capítulos 9 y 10) y consideramos que sus contenidos pueden ser de utilidad tanto para estudiantes universitarios de diversos grados del ámbi...

The United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDG) represent a combination of human needs and basic rights that every individual around the world should be able to enjoy. More specifically, a list of eight goals was agreed (referred to poverty, primary education, gender equality, child mortality, maternal health, diseases as AIDS and malaria, en...

The increasing number of forecasting techniques raises questions about their accuracy, suggesting the need of evaluating alternative forecasting procedures. With this aim, this paper focuses on the last M-Competition developed by Makridakis and Hibon (2000), whose results have been compared with those obtained with two information measures: U Theil...

From its very beginning, the Information Theory has been considered as a useful tool for economic analysis, since it provides suitable measures of inequality, industrial concentration or goodness of fit. One of the most widely used information measures is the Entropy proposed by Shannon. Given a variable X with probabilities: p 1 , p 2 ,. .. , p n...

A controversial debate has arisen about the effects on household electricity prices of electricity generation from Renewable Energy Sources and regulatory reforms in the European Union Electricity Market. In this paper we propose to use panel data models with the aim of explaining the household electricity prices as a function of several economic v...

El objetivo es analizar el potencial del software libre como herramienta estratégica en el ámbito universitario, presentando, a pesar de las limitaciones de información estadística, algunas evidencias sobre la brecha digital existente e identificando oportunidades de mejora.

Despite the efforts devoted to the analysis of the digital divide over the last years, the regional evidence on this issue is still scarce. Within this context, the goals of this paper are twofold: (1) measuring the digital divide across the regions of the 27 Member States and within each country and (2) explaining the observed regional disparities...

The new economics and business degrees adapted to the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) must face the challenge of training individuals capable of analyzing and interpreting the functioning of the economy improving the well-being of the society. Therefore, econometrics should be considered as a strategic tool which is narrowly related with some...

The European Union Sustainable Development Strategy (EU SDS), initially proposed by the European Council in Gothenburg in 2001 and renewed in June 2006, aims at the continuous improvement of the quality of life for current and future generations. The strategy focuses on issues such as climate change, social equity and cohesion, public health and po...

Over the last years great efforts have been devoted to the analysis of the digital divide at the international level. In contrast, the evidence about the regional digital divide is still scarce, especially in the case of the European Union. Within this context, the aim of this paper is to remedy this deficiency, trying to throw some light on the st...

In this paper we summarize our experiences based in Blended Learning, which provide several interesting findings, based on both students ́and teachers ́ opinions. We have experienced that doing Econometrics is a good way of learning Econometrics, as it proves the teamwork developed with Gretl, which has shown to be a suitable, user-friendly, flexib...

The European Union is working for a global agreement to control climate change. Several steps have been taken in order to cut its emissions and implement energy efficiency measures. In this context, this paper analyzes the role of renewable energies in the European Union, studying their evolution and shift-share components, thus identifying the com...

Over the last few years, information and communication technologies have become an essential part of daily life, affecting education, employment, and leisure, among other activities. Nonetheless, many individuals still reap few or no benefits from these technologies, and there are resilient gaps in their use. Within this larger context, the authors...

In a global knowledge-based economy, the performance of business organizations depends on ensuring that all categories of employees possess current and up-to-date knowledge and skills. Therefore, businesses must analyze their training needs in greater depth and update workers’ skills much more rapidly than in the past, while attempting to reduce tr...

Over the last decade the Internet has brought about significant changes in the economies and societies worldwide. It has changed communication habits, adapting incrementally to the needs of the users of the networks. It has created a world-wide web of knowledge sharing, creativity, and collaboration and has fostered globalization. In this context,...

Recent studies stress the crucial role of broadband diffusion to enhance economic growth and performance. Therefore, the analysis of the factors shaping its diffusion becomes a matter of special importance. In this context, this article examines the impact of several socio-economic factors on the likelihood of broadband subscription, using a bivari...

This paper contributes to the line of research devoted to the diffusion of Information and Communication Technologies. We analyse patterns of Internet diffusion across people with disabilities in ten European countries, a geographical area for which empirical evidence is scarce. Results show that disability status has a significant negative effect...

The European Higher Education Area (EHEA) provides the opportunity of exploring new ways of teaching and learning, emphasizing the role of students in the learning process. In the case of Econometrics (which will play an outstanding role in Economics and Business degrees), our experience has shown that doing Econometrics is a suitable way of learni...

RESUMEN La principal prioridad de la Europa ampliada consiste en acercar las condiciones de vida de los nuevos miembros a las de los demás estados de la Unión. En este contexto se ha reconocido el potencial de las tecnologías de la información y la comunicación para el crecimiento económico, el empleo y la cohesión social. Las políticas para la int...

The development of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) suggests the convenience of exploring new ways of teaching and learning, emphasizing the role of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), student mobility and university networks. In this context, virtual campuses provide the opportunity of efficiently implement ICT and cooperat...

La elaboración de predicciones de crecimiento sectorial regional es el principal objetivo de la red Hispalink desde hace más de dos décadas. En este trabajo, realizado en colaboración, se combinan las aportaciones de varios equipos regionales y el equipo central para describir el método de trabajo y algunas de nuestras experiencias en el ámbito de...