Tres ensayos sobre el comercio internacional de soja y técnicas de análisis del crecimiento

Abstract

This thesis is focused on the analysis of the competitiveness in agricultural sectors, particularly on soybean exports worldwide. In addition, some methodological proposals are presented through the study of the agricultural sector of 47 Spanish regions. According to the economic theories, the agricultural competitiveness of a region depends on factors such as factor endowments, technology, production costs, infrastructure, and the geographical location of the studied region. For this reason, as a novelty this thesis incorporates regional economics to the study of competitiveness. This way, it is possible to assess the agricultural competitiveness from three different point of views: internal, regional and global. The results highlight the key role played by the specialization of countries or regions, as a factor of improvement of the competitiveness in the long term. Besides, they point out that the economic variables are affected by more dimensions than the national one. In other words, changes on economic variables are influenced by the local context, the neighboring regions, the national trends, and finally, they also respond to the global context where they belong.