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Introduction
Full Professor of Applied Economics at the University of Seville (Spain).
Member of the European Union Regional Economic Applications Laboratory (EU-REAL). Member of the Institute of Economics and Business (IUSEN) and the research group "SMEs and economic development" (PYMED) at the University of Seville.
Visiting scholar at the University of Groningen (The Netherlands), the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (USA) and the University of Reading (UK).
Current institution
Additional affiliations
October 1997 - present
Publications
Publications (76)
When linkages between industries are studied from the perspective of production chains, sequencing is important. In this respect, both the strength of the linkages and the distance between industries are relevant. Distance is measured by the average propagation length, defined as the average number of steps it takes a stimulus in one industry to pr...
This paper explores the determinants of innovation in small businesses from a survey of more than 700 self-employed workers in Andalusia (Spain). Self-employed people running businesses with and without employees were included in the study and two types of innovation – product and process innovation – were differentiated.The theoretical framework a...
This paper investigates the influence of entrepreneurs’ characteristics on innovation in regions with different levels of development. By doing so, this work seeks to contribute to a better understanding of the role of entrepreneurs in the functioning and performance of regional innovation systems. The influence of entrepreneurs’ personal character...
This paper examines the influence of tourism intermediaries on innovation in SMEs in the hotel industry from the perspective of the global value chain approach. The paper contributes towards characterizing the changing patterns of governance in the tourism global value chains. In addition, it provides useful information about SMEs’ innovation for t...
This article aims to identify the factors that influence the digital transformation process in
the restaurant industry. The proposed theoretical framework differentiates three groups of
conditioning factors of digitalisation in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in this
sector: (1) the personal characteristics of the entrepreneurs/managers;...
Purpose. This study aims to explain how IT-enabled organizational change occurs at varying rates due to the specific characteristics of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The paper investigates the primary determinants of IT-enabled organizational change in these organizations.
Design/methodology/approach. By integrating the resource-based...
This article explores the determinants of the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) with special attention to the impact of competencies and skills. The research was based on data from a representative sample of SMEs in Spain and used logistic regression econometric analysis. Additionally, the study a...
This paper analyses the factors that determine the process of digital transformation of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). To this end, digital transformation is conceptually approached as an innovation process in a company that affects its products and processes. The proposed theoretical framework integrates, from a holistic perspective, t...
The profound transformation of business and society as a whole, brought about by digitalization, calls for the development of business strategies to meet the challenges associated with digital disruption and to manage its marked impact on the competitiveness of organizations. To achieve this goal, it is essential to assess the extent of digital tra...
Purpose. This study analyses the internal and external factors that determine hindrances in the adoption of e-commerce technologies within SMEs. Specifically, it elucidates the significant and potential threats that SMEs need to consider when adopting this technology.
Design/methodology/approach. The theoretical TOE model is employed, which holis...
Purpose – This study explores the role of international tour operators as the agents assuming the governance and the upgrading of the tourism global value chains (GVCs), with a special focus on their influence on the development of technological capabilities (TCs) in the hotel industry.
Design/methodology/approach - The data used in this article or...
Resumen: El presente trabajo investiga la existencia de patrones diferenciados de supervivencia de los negocios creados por auto-empleados inmigrantes, en comparación con los impulsados por auto-empleados nacionales, a partir de una base de datos conformada por el conjunto de los negocios incubados por los servicios de apoyo público desarrollados p...
This study analyses the impact of various types of innovation (product, process, organisational, and marketing innovation) on the business efficiency of small- and medium-sized hotel enterprises (SMHEs). Innovation in new products/services, support activities for the internal processes, sales channels or new positioning techniques for the product i...
This paper investigates determinants of the survival of new businesses and, in particular, focuses on the impacts of urbanisation, education, and gender of the entrepreneurs. The database used holds information related to new companies created in Andalusia (Spain) in the 2009‐14 period using the incubation services offered by the regional administr...
This chapter reviews the concept and measurement of sustainable tourism at regional level. Various contributions towards the definition and the measurement of sustainable tourism are presented, with special attention paid to the initiative of Measuring the Sustainability of Tourism. This project, launched by the World Tourism Organization in 2015,...
This paper studies the influence of organizational culture on the implementation of innovations in small businesses. Cameron and Quinn's Competing Values Framework is applied to capture the organizational culture. The empirical analysis is carried out using a sample of 194 small businesses from two regions in Paraguay: the Asunción area and Central...
This paper studies the differences in the impact of global tour operators on the management and performance of hotels in coastal and inland areas. The empirical analysis is based on a survey conducted in 2016 on 375 Spanish SMEs operating in the hotel industry. A multi-group comparison analysis was carried out using Partial Least Squares (PLS) stru...
This paper studies the determinants of the risk-taking propensity in immigrant-owned businesses. The paper has a particular focus on first-generation Chinese immigrants and the effect of the so-called “guanxi”, a specific form of social capital for Chinese communities. The empirical research is based on a survey conducted in 2012 on Chinese immigra...
Inter‐firm cooperation has been considered an important strategy for SMEs to overcome competitive difficulties. Despite the relevance of this strategy there are no studies that jointly consider how entrepreneurs' characteristics, organizational factors, and institutional features influence SMEs to establish cooperative agreements. In order to bridg...
This article studies the influence of ‘coopetition’, that is, cooperation between competitors, on the innovative behaviour of restaurant firms. The analysis is based on data gathered from a representative survey conducted on Spanish small and medium-sized enterprises operating in the restaurant industry. A binary logistic regression specification i...
This paper analyzes the effects of entrepreneurs’ personal values and their entrepreneurial
attitudes, as forms of intellectual capital, on the innovative behavior of small businesses.
The influence of personal values is examined through Schwartz's value theory and
entrepreneurial attitudes via assessments associated with risk taking and personal
a...
This paper studies innovativeness in SMEs from a set of innovation indicators at the firm level, capturing various types of innovation (product, process, organisational, and marketing innovations) and the level of innovativeness in these firm’s developments. The article identifies two separate dimensions in the innovativeness of Spanish SMEs, using...
Spanish objective 1 regions are mainly peripheral regions which traditionally have suffered from low accessibility to the main markets and low levels of education and entrepreneurial and management capacities. Once Spain became member of the EU the combined effects of competition in the so called “single” European market and the investments in tran...
Innovation is one of the key attributes that sets the entrepreneurs apart from the rest of self-employed people. This paper attempts to distinguish between these two categories by means of exploring the determinants of process innovation in small businesses using a survey of self-employed workers in Andalusia, Spain. The theoretical framework adopt...
This paper reviews the approaches proposed in the literature to analyze innovation in tourism at the firm level. Firstly, the paper presents the specificities of the tourism industry that condition the nature of innovation in this sector compared to other activities. In this respect, the special characteristics of the generation and transfer of kno...
Las características personales de los empresarios condicionan el funcionamiento y los
resultados de las pequeñas y medianas empresas a nivel microeconómico, determinando
junto con otros factores (organizacionales, económicos y del entorno) su calidad
emprendedora. A su vez, la calidad emprendedora en un ámbito territorial específico
determina la ca...
Las características personales de los empresarios condicionan el funcionamiento y los resultados de las pequeñas y medianas empresas a nivel microeconómico, determinando junto con otros factores (organizacionales, económicos y del entorno) su calidad emprendedora. A su vez, la calidad emprendedora en un ámbito territorial específico determina la ca...
This paper studies the influence of social capital on immigrants’ self-employment, differentiating between structural, relational and cognitive social capital. The paper has a particular focus on Chinese immigrants and explores the effects of the so-called guanxi, a specific form of social capital for Chinese communities. The empirical research is...
This paper analyzes the determinants of small and medium-sized enterprises’ technology adoption in the retail trade industry. From the theoretical perspective, two types of influential factors are differentiated in this respect: the personal characteristics of the manager/business owner and the business’s organizational characteristics. The empiric...
In this paper cultural values and regulatory barriers to start-up are presented as characteristics of the business environment which influence the international differences in the level of entrepreneurial activity. A first objective of this paper is to measure the importance of a country’s cultural values in determining the national level of entrep...
This paper discusses the significance, trends and achievements of the entrepreneurship and small and medium-sized enterprise policy in Anda-lusia developed with the support of the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF). The lack of entrepreneurial culture and business environment conditions unfavourable to entrepreneurship have traditionally act...
Este artículo reivindica el papel de las PYME como actores estratégicos en la conformación de
una buena imagen exterior de España. En el actual escenario de globalización, en el que la nacionalidad
de las grandes corporaciones tiende a diluirse, las PYME podrían llegar a contribuir
más establemente a la marca España por su vinculación más permanent...
El objetivo de este trabajo es justificar la relevancia de los conceptos “dependencia funcional” y “dependencia productiva” en el análisis internacional de las características del tejido empresarial. El trabajo recopila las principales aportaciones que se han realizado sobre dichos conceptos y los enmarca en el ámbito internacional, hasta ahora ine...
En este articulo adoptamos el punto de vista de que no sólo es relevante el tamaño de los eslabonamientos sectoriales, sino también la distancia económica entre los sectores. Para medir esta distancia, definimos la longitud media de propagación como una representación en promedio del número de pasos necesarios para que un cambio exógeno en un secto...
The paper advocates the role of universities in the knowledge-based economy as suppliers of entrepreneurship education in order to stimulate the emergence of entrepreneurs among their graduates. The paper presents the University of Seville (US) in Spain and the Academy of Economic Studies (AES) in Bucharest, Romania as two case studies. The first p...
This paper explores the nature and determinants of product innovation in small businesses from a survey of more than 1,500 small firms in Spain. Two levels of factors affecting innovation are considered: (1) The personal characteristics of the entrepreneurs -their age, motivations, educational background and degree of interpersonal trust. (2) The c...
This paper analyses the characteristics of SMEs in less-developed areas in comparison with more advanced economies. The conceptual framework includes different factors making up the so-called ‘entrepreneurial quality’ of the SME sector: the personal characteristics of the entrepreneurs (motivations and previous experience), different dimensions of...
This report presents the case study for Andalucía (Spain) as part of the study ‘Evaluation of the Main Achievements of Cohesion Policy Programmes over the Longer Term in 15 Selected Regions (from 1989-1993 Programming Period to the Present)’ which is being managed by the European Policies Research Centre and the London School of Economics. The rese...
This paper studies the mediating role of cultural values in explaining the total entrepreneurial activity (TEA) and the entrepreneurs’ motivation -differentiating opportunity versus necessity motives- in countries with different levels of development. Data for 56 countries coming from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) and the Schwartz Value...
Purpose – The aim of this paper is to compare the particular characteristics of industrial SMEs in low- and high-income regions from the perspective of their “entrepreneurial quality”.
Design/methodology/approach – Based on three groups of factors, (personal characteristics of entrepreneurs, entrepreneurial orientation and productive dependence of...
Certain qualitative characteristics of the small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) operating within a territory might be essential to explain their macroeconomic impact. From this perspective, this article explores the relationship between the composition of the SME sector and the level of regional economic development. In this regard, a concept...
This paper proposes a multi-level approach to analyse the production chains in which two characteristic tourism activities – the hotel and travel agency industries – participate. Firstly, from a macroeconomic perspective, input-output techniques are used to identify the most significant tourism production chains from the regional input–output table...
This paper describes a research project currently being developed by the authors. It aims to analyse the role played by psychosocial, cultural and socioeconomic factors in shaping the entrepreneurial intention. Survey methods will be used on a population of potential entrepreneurs (having not yet performed actual entrepreneurial behaviours). In thi...
In this paper, two dimensions are differentiated within the fragmentation process: a spatial and a functional one. On the one hand, due to fragmentation and industrial relocation, regional and national economies might be losing some internal linkages. This spatial fragmentation determines a decrease in the complexity of the production systems. On t...
En los últimos años, los poderes públicos han fomentando a los emprendedores y apoyado a las PYME como estrategia de desarrollo por su impacto en el crecimiento económico, la creación de empleo y la reducción de la pobreza. En este trabajo se discute la justificación de esas políticas, así como su orientación más adecuada en el actual escenario de...
En este trabajo se plantea una caracterización de los procesos de desenvolvimiento socioeconómico sustentada en la hipótesis de existencia de circularidades o procesos de causalidad acumulativa que impulsan hacia adelante a los países hiperdesarrollados y atrapan a los hipodesarrollados, condenándolos a situaciones de atraso relativo. Asimismo, en...
Desde los años setenta la externalización productiva, la liberalización comercial y la apertura creciente de los países en desarrollo a la inversión extranjera han impulsando la fragmentación de los procesos de producción, la aparición y el desarrollo de Cadenas de Valor Globales (cvg) en donde grandes corporaciones y pymes participan en distintas...
En este trabajo se plantea una caracterización de los procesos de desenvolvimiento socioeconómico sustentada en la hipótesis de existencia de circularidades o procesos de causalidad acumulativa que impulsan hacia adelante a los países hiperdesarrollados y atrapan a los hipodesarrollados, condenándolos a situaciones de atraso relativo. Asimismo, en...
Romero I. and Santos F. J. (2007) Firm size and regional linkages: a typology of manufacturing establishments in southern Spain, Regional Studies 41, 571-584. Regions with different levels of development are characterized by different enterprise compositions according to firm size and regional productive linkages. Using these two variables and two...
Regions with different levels of development are characterized by different enterprise compositions according to firm size and regional productive linkages. Using these two variables and two additional ones -the technological level and the position in the value chain-, the composition of the industrial sector in any region can be studied. In this r...
En este trabajo, en primer lugar, se plantea una panorámica de la evolución reciente y de la situación actual de la política europea de promoción del espíritu empresarial y de fomento de la pyme. A continuación, aplicando técnicas de análisis cluster a un conjunto de variables proxy, se identifican grupos homogéneos de países de la UE en función de...
In this paper we question the imprecise use of the term ‘entrepreneur’ that is frequently found in the literature about entrepreneurship. In this sense, we argue that the distinction between entrepreneurs and small business owners (Carland et. al., 1984; Chan y Lau, 1993) has an important analytical interest. The empirical analysis is based on data...
La idea de articulación productiva se aplica en el estudio de las relaciones intersectoriales atendiendo a la importancia estratégica de ciertas ramas productivas dotadas de una particular capacidad de empuje o arrastre. No obstante, la observación de los encadenamientos productivos se puede realizar también a escala microeconómica, adoptando como...
En este artículo se cuestiona el empleo poco preciso del término empresario que frecuentemente se encuentra en la literatura sobre “entrepreneurship”. En este sentido, sejustifica el valor analítico de la distinción entre empresarios (“entrepreneurs”) y propietarios de pequeños negocios (“small business owners”) (Carland et al., 1984; Chan y Lau, 1...
RESUMEN
En este trabajo se contrasta la influencia del tamaño empresarial sobre la intensidad de los encadenamientos productivos regionales a partir de datos procedentes de la encuesta realizada por el Instituto de Estadística de Andalucía entre los establecimientos industriales andaluces para la estimación de las tablas input-output regionales....
La Unión Europea viene desarrollando a lo largo de las últimas décadas un programa de acción enfocado a la promoción del espíritu empresarial y al fomento de la PYME. En este trabajo se discute, en primer lugar, la pertinencia de las actuaciones encaminadas a impulsar el espíritu emprendedor en la UE a la luz de recientes aportaciones teóricas y em...
In this paper, we adopt the viewpoint that not only the size of sectoral linkages is relevant but also the economic distance between sectors. To measure distance, we define the average propagation length as the average number of steps it takes an exogenous change in one sector to affect the value of production in another sector. This distance does...
La importancia económica del trabajo autónomo no se circunscribe a su contribución a la creación de empleo y de renta, aún siendo ésta ya de por sí relevante. Más allá de este efecto directo, el trabajo autónomo asume un papel indispensable en el funcionamiento de cualquier de economía de mercado, al constituir un germen fundamental en la generació...
En este trabajo se resalta, en el plano teórico, la importancia de los
encadenamientos productivos en el desarrollo endógeno como fuente de externalidades
estáticas y dinámicas. Desde esta perspectiva, se analiza la estructura productiva de la
economía andaluza a partir de las tablas input-output regionales de 1995 (Instituto de
Estadística de Anda...
En el plano teórico, se profundiza en el análisis de las características de la empresarialidad en los modelos de desarrollo endógeno y se presenta un marco analítico aplicable al estudio de las pautas de articulación productiva de los sistemas productivos locales o regionales. Así mismo, se propone una tipología de empresas en función de sus modelo...
During the last few decades the European Union has been carrying out a programme focused on the promotion of entrepreneurship and SMEs. In this article, we first address the pertinence of these measures to encourage entrepreneurship in the European Union, considering some recent theoretical and empirical findings about the contribution of entrepren...
