Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

The success of EU cohesion policy, as it happens more generally with the public policies that are made at the EU level, is dependent on the administrative capacity of the public organizations with implementing powers within each Member State, including the regional and local tiers. The necessity to develop these skills in different territories and sectors, to guarantee the execution of the investments assigned, has required the European Commission, in cooperation with the OECD in some initiatives, to provide diverse tools for national Administrations to help them to strengthen these skills. This contribution reviews the conceptual literature on policy capacity, and it clarifies the definition of administrative capacity. Furthermore, it examines various empirical papers that deal with the link between administrative capacity and the absorption of EU funds, along with the main projects for administrative capacity development that have been conducted by the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Regional and Urban Policy (DG REGIO).

Book review of authors John Bachtler, Peter Berkowitz, Sally Hardy and Tatjana Muravska: EU Cohesion Policy. Reassessing performance and direction, London and New York, Routledge, 2017, 345 pp.

This review refers to the work “Experiences, challenges and challenges  of teaching public policies in Mexico” coordinated by doctors Raúl Hernández Mar, María Gabriela Martínez Tiburcio, Jorge Enrique Culebro Moreno and Alejandro Navarro Arredondo, published in Mexico by the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana in 2021. This work brings together a series of teaching experiences, formation of work programs, undergraduate and postgraduate study plans in different universities in the country such as the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Unidad Lerma, Colegio de Jalisco, the National Autonomous University of Mexico, El Colegio de Sonora, among others. In addition to the story of strengthening school programs, this book is the right place to present less explored forms of teaching, such as the case study and gamification, to name a couple of examples. The richness of this work is that it compiles a series of formalization and institutionalization experiences in different Mexican states.

Review of the book from Mario Munta, EU Socio-economic Governance in Central and Eastern Europe: The European Semester and National Employment Policies, Routledge, 2021, 261 pp.

Review of the book from Roman Krznaric: El buen antepasado. Cómo pensar a largo plazo en un mundo cortoplacista, Capitán Swing, 2022, 304 pp.

Review of the book from Zeger van der Wal, The 21st Century Public Manager Challenges, People and Strategies, Palgrave, 2017, 392 pp.

The sports phenomenon has grown considerably in our society in recent decades, it being generally accepted that sport provides innumerable benefits in the field of leisure, health and training. Added to this are some supposed economic benefits, widely disseminated by impact studies with results rarely questioned despite the spectacular figures published. The economic impacts of the six sporting events brought here reach values ​​that, according to their authors, multiply between 1.81 and 9.98 the "investment", the "expenditure made" or the "resources used", implying that they are benefits or directly calling that impact. The disparity found in the nomenclature and in the results obtained is explained by the different measurement methods used and by the lack of uniformity in their application, as can be seen in the economic impact studies on which this article is based. We will explain how these studies have reached the published figures and how to solve possible deficiencies in them that would allow determining more realistic values ​​of the real economic impact of sporting events; For this reason, we bring here an alternative method for its measurement, which we will call net social utility.  Its application aims to determine the utility or net benefits generated for society by public resources allocated to a sporting event. This is a different proposal from the usual economic impact studies, which are based on measuring the movements of money generated by a certain public expenditure, such as subsidies for sporting events. Keywords: economic impact, sport, economy, utility, benefits, costs, impact.

Applying meta-evaluation methodology, this article investigates the existence and categorization of technological trajectories in 254 cooperative research projects belonging to the agri-food value chain that have been supported by a public program in Spain, between 2016 and 2020. Through statistical analysis, K-means cluster classification and econometric patterns, five technological trajectories have been identified, representative of innovation options in agriculture and agribusiness, linked to the production of raw materials, industrial transformation, use of advanced services, management of by-products, waste and marketing, and irrigation management. The conclusions of this work raise the possibilities of meta-evaluation to investigate complex realities and, in the case studied, the usefulness of defining technological trajectories as an element to design new public incentive policies and, in particular, those that should support innovation technology in agriculture and food processing, in the perspective of meeting the 2050 climate change objectives.

Transportation has demonstrated its hegemonic position in the aftermath of the pandemic. In fact, despite the paralysis of many industries, transportation has continued its activity, demonstrating its value and resilience. As a result, it is one of the sectors with the more significant presence in global economies. Therefore, this research analyzes the thematic evolution of the relationship between transportation and the economy through scientific mapping and performance analysis. For this purpose, a study was carried out with all articles published on the Web of Science from 1900 to June 2022. The concurrence of authors, journals, research centers, keywords, documents, countries, and h-index was analyzed. SciMat and VOSviewer were used for insertion, de-duplication, normalization, categorization, analysis, interpretation, and graphical representation.The results have shown that, during periods of crisis such as the last pandemic, scientific production increases and the number of topics also doubles. However, sustainability, environment, and impact studies are the driving themes, so future lines of research may focus on different aspects or delve into relationships that do not only measure the economic and environmental impact of a transport infrastructure.