Spanish Case Research Articles

The acquisition of sociolinguistic variation by multilingual merchants: the case of seventeenth-century Spanish

Abstract This article analyzes an unpublished corpus of 131 letters written in Spanish by four Dutch merchants during the seventeenth-century (1669–1677). The aim of the investigation is to determine whether the variation found in these letters was internal, external, or both, and to study the factors that favored each source. To do so, I will look at vowel variation in this corpus. Since standard vowel variants were being selected in seventeenth-century Spanish, the research questions addressed in this work are the following: Did multilingual merchants acquire the emerging standard of the moment? Did multilingual merchants contribute to the selection of standard variants? Did multilingual merchants acquire the sociolinguistic variation of that period? How did multilingual merchants differ from L1 speakers and why? How did linguistic and social factors influence this variation? The results revealed a great amount of intra- and inter-speaker vowel variation, and this variability was a matter of both internal and external factors. Therefore, this study argues that, while multilingual merchants acquired some of the standard variants that were being selected in the emerging standard Spanish of the seventeenth century, they reported linguistic variation that can be explained considering the context of use and the socio-economic conditions underlying their acquisition of linguistic repertoires.

Gaining local legitimacy in stabilisation operations: the Spanish peacekeepers case in Lebanon-UNIFIL II

ABSTRACT This article analyses the role of peacekeeping in enhancing a host nation's local legitimacy within its population, focusing on the mission actions from a bottom-up perspective. This research, which used a micro-approach with the Spanish contingent case study in UNIFIL II, involved two field studies carried out between 2010 and 2016 in Lebanon with interviews and focus groups with Spanish military personnel of this UN mission and local Lebanese actors. The results show how the implementation of both material actions – the provision of public goods and security – and non-material actions – respect and an in-depth knowledge about the local context –, performed by Spanish peacekeepers towards local actors, helped to improve the local legitimacy and reconciled the goals of the mission with the interests of Lebanese society and state.

Short-term electricity price forecasting through demand and renewable generation prediction

Electricity market prices depend on various variables, including energy demand, weather conditions, gas prices, renewable generation, and other factors. Fluctuating prices are a common characteristic of electricity markets, making electricity price forecasting a complex process where predicting different variables is crucial. This paper introduces a hybrid forecasting model developed for the Spanish case. The model comprises four forecasting tools, with three of them relying on artificial neural networks, while the demand forecasting model employs a similar-day approach with temperature correction. This model can be employed by electrical energy trading companies to enhance their trading strategies in the day-ahead market and in derivative markets with a time horizon ranging from two to ten days. The results indicate that, with a forecasting horizon of two days, the price forecast has a rMAE of 8.18%. Furthermore, the model enables a market agent to accurately decide whether to purchase energy in the daily market or in the derivatives market in 69.9% of the days.

Behind the budget: analysing the factors driving sustainable urban development financing in Spain

ABSTRACT This study addresses the factors that determine EU-funded resources in the context of urban development policies in Spain. The interplay of institutional capacity, prior inertia, and local characteristics emerge as determinant variables on Spanish urban financing dynamics. The analysis of the 121 funded cases in the 2021 Spanish call for sustainable urban development reveals the presence of specific local characteristics to be crucial in assessing funding. Stable small and medium-sized municipalities with previous funding experience are more likely to secure funding. The Spanish case emerges as paradigmatic, illustrating how current urban funding frameworks recognise cities with unique characteristics as exemplary models.

Decarceration in Southern Europe: Notes on Climate Change in the Penal Field

AbstractAgainst the backdrop of the economic and political crises affecting Europe in the late 2000s and early 2010s, incarceration rates began to shrink in many European countries, ushering in a decarceration period that continues to this day—albeit with cross-border divergences. In fact, Europe was the world region with the greatest decline in incarceration rates in the 2010s. Evidently, this unexpected shift stands in stark contrast to the penal populism policies characterising penality in global north regions in the 1990s and 2000s, as well as to the mass incarceration path still followed by many global south jurisdictions in the 2020s. Spain is a suitable national case to examine this recent turn, since Spanish incarceration rates increased almost eightfold in just three decades, before an intriguing and steady decline began that is almost unparalleled in western Europe. This paper focuses on the Spanish case, exploring the background and proximate causes that have enabled the current decarceration scenario. In addition, it scrutinises if and to what extent the changes witnessed in the Spanish case reverberate across wider European regions. In so doing, the paper attempts to grasp the climate change impacting the penal field in many global north jurisdictions.

Intangible Capital as a Driver of Labor Productivity in Regions and Industries: Evidence of the Spanish Case

ABSTRACTIn the last decade, many studies discussed the impact of intangible investment on firms' performance. However, comparing the effect of different types of intangible investments at regional and sectoral level is not well explored. The paper aims to fill this gap by assessing the impact of several intangible capital on labor productivity using for the first‐time updated data for the period 2000–2019. Adopting panel data techniques and system GMM, the results show that regions with higher endowments of intangible capital get higher levels of labor productivity. The study results also highlight the importance of differentiating between different sectors and types of intangible capital as they have different impact on productivity labor. In the primary sector only investments in R&D result in additional productivity gains. In the manufacturing industry, investments in R&D and software result in additional productivity gains while the service sector also increases labor productivity through other intangibles assets with innovative property such as mineral exploration, entertainment, and artistic originals.

‘Now they move you, now they don’t’: transferability, territory and (im)mobilities at the Spanish peripheries

ABSTRACT The analytical emphasis on migration control and external borders has overlooked the mechanisms of state regulation of internal mobility in the peripheral territories of the countries of the European Union. Based on an analysis focused on the Spanish case, and more specifically on the enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla and the Canary Islands, this article introduces the concept of transferability to show the logics and dynamics of intraterritorial migrant (im)mobility between the peripheral enclaves and mainland Spain. The analysis shows the construction – and evolution – of (in)transferable migrant subjects and the complex and changing puzzle of (im)mobility at these peripheral geographies.

Assessing risk indicators of intimate partner femicide considering victim's coping strategies to violence: A dynamic multilevel linear mixed model based on genetic algorithms

Intimate partner femicide (IPF) is a grave social and health concern affecting women worldwide, with approximately 30,000 deaths annually at the hands of their current or former intimate partners. Previous studies have focused on identifying risk factors for IPF and developing risk assessment tools to identify high-risk cases. However, an important aspect that has been overlooked in these studies is victims' coping strategies in response to intimate partner violence. Understanding victims' coping strategies can provide valuable insights into how they deal with the abuse and can inform the development of effective interventions and prevention strategies. This study aims to address this gap by developing a multilevel linear mixed model (LMM) to analyze the impact of engagement and disengagement coping on the likelihood of IPF and identify common and specific IPF risk indicators for these coping strategies. A total of 491 Spanish cases of violence against women by current or former intimate partners were analyzed from penal sentences issued by Spanish provincial and supreme courts from 2019 to 2022. The LMM model obtained from the study has competitive performance in identifying IPF and non-IPF cases, including risk indicators of prior history of injuries, history of sexual aggression, frequency and escalation of violence, physical violence, place of crime, lonely place of crime, and community presence. Victims with engagement coping and disengagement coping share some risk indicators, while others belong to just one category. Overall, the results suggest that victims with disengagement coping are more predisposed to suffer IPF than victims with engagement coping. This evidenced-based knowledge emphasizes the significance of considering coping strategies in predicting and preventing IPF, with further implications discussed at the end of this paper.

Cuestionando el modelo Bernanke-Blanchard en la Eurozona: Ilustración del caso español

This is a critical review on mainstream Macroeconomics, questioning its modeling that is far from reality, artificial and inducing current crises. It is paid attention on the latest model of prominent macroeconomists, Bernanke and Blanchard, who seek to explain the COVID-19 crisis, without relating it to the preceding crisis, such as the Great Recession and its false management based on credit expansions without voluntary savings and with unconventional measures from the Central Banks. The model of the aforementioned authors is analyzed, offering its application to the Spanish case and in comparison with other economies in the Eurozone. The review is completed with a critical corollary of the heterodox synthesis, offering the divergent vision and foundations of the Austrian Economics and the New-Institutional Approaches from the New Political Economy, which in turn allows us to diagnose the current Macroeconomics and its crisis.

May urban digital twins spur the New Urban Agenda? The Spanish case study

The New Urban Agenda was conceived as a global endeavor to transpose the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the 2030 Agenda into urban areas. Both initiatives were merged into the Spanish Urban Agenda (SUA), which includes 10 strategic and 30 specific goals, among which leading and promoting digital innovation toward the development of smart cities stand out. As Urban Digital Twins (UDTs) are a technology that arises to enhance smart cities, this research aims at assessing how they may contribute to the achievement of the SUA. A framework was accordingly built to associate UDTs with the SUA to then be applied to the Barcelona digital twin as case study. A combination of an in-depth literature review on UDTs and the Delphi technique was used as methodological approach. More than 70 % of the strategic and specific goals included in the SUA, as well as the four sustainability dimensions are represented in the new instrument. The case study reflected a limited contribution in pursuing the SUA. Nevertheless, the proposed framework offers potential lines of action to reinforce the role of the Barcelona digital twin towards the SUA.

Effects of the Minimum Wage (MW) on Income Inequality: Systematic Review and Analysis of the Spanish Case

The minimum wage has become a standard measure in the economic and social policies of countries all over the world. The primary objective of this measure is to guarantee that workers receive a minimum wage that allows them to lead a decent life, thereby reducing inequality and poverty. However, studies on the minimum wage have not focused on assessing the effects on these dimensions but only on employment. The objective of this study is to address this research gap by analysing the effects of minimum wage increases on income inequality and poverty. To this end, firstly, a systematic review of the empirical analyses was conducted using the PRISMA methodology, with a view to ensuring that all empirical evidence was available. Secondly, the Spanish case was examined. The significant increase in minimum wage in Spain in 2019 (21.3% in real terms) presents an invaluable opportunity to utilise this event as a natural experiment to generate new evidence. A difference-in-differences approach was employed to assess the impact of this phenomenon in the period 2018–2019 with microdata from European Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC for Spain). In doing so, two basic scientific contributions were made. The first one, a systematic, exhaustive, and up-to-date literature review (up to June 2024), as there is, to our knowledge, no recent systematic review of this relationship (minimum wage vs. inequality). The available evidence indicates a clear inverse relationship between the minimum wage and inequalities and poverty. The second one, regarding the Spanish case, there has been a dearth of scientific studies on this subject. Thus, this paper provides new scientific evidence demonstrating that a significant increase in the minimum wage can significantly improve the income of low-wage earners, thereby reducing income inequality and in-work poverty. Furthermore, there is evidence of a spillover effect towards income groups closer to the treatment group.

Language Attitudes in a Historic Latino Community: The Case of Spanish in Northwest Indiana

Despite the burgeoning Latino population in the Midwest, research on language attitudes in this region remains sparse. This study addresses this gap by examining language attitudes and beliefs towards Spanish in the Northwest Indiana region, one of the oldest Latino immigration gateways in the Midwest. Data collected from a 2018–2019 sociolinguistic survey, involving 236 participants representative of the local Latino community, form the basis of the analysis. The study aims to elucidate attitudes towards various Spanish dialects, particularly the local variety. Findings indicate widespread acceptance of the local Spanish variety, with participants viewing its divergence from Mexican or Puerto Rican Spanish as normal and inevitable. Despite perceptions of linguistic mixing with English, the community’s Spanish is valued as an effective communication tool and cultural asset, including in educational settings. This positive attitude towards a stigmatized linguistic variety suggests a preference for any form of Spanish over none, particularly in situations of low Spanish language maintenance. The study of language attitudes shows that speakers will tend to reproduce in their speech new ways of speaking that they find acceptable. This generalized behavior, in turn, leads toward linguistic change.

Gender, vulnerabilities and resilience: a critical approach to the Spanish case

Vulnerability and resilience are two concepts currently present in most social policies, which have been positioned in the main discourses regarding the reduction of gender inequality. Current actions to mitigate vulnerability are focused on the search for resilience and the public policies are guided under this paradigm. Through a literature review methodology, this article performs a critical analysis of the dimensions of vulnerability and resilience, currently present in social and development policies in Spain that engage gender inequality and permeate to the social welfare system. The evolution of the treatment towards women in Spanish policies shows a change in the treatment of women, from being seen as a single subject (vulnerable group) to being seen as women with agency in situations of vulnerability. But this fact causes only few changes in the structures that generate inequality and situations of vulnerability and coexisted with the transfer of responsibility present in resilience approaches.

Between Cooptation and Surveillance: Varieties of Civic Monitoring in Spain

Civic monitoring is a democratic practice that allows citizens to hold accountable powerholders and enhance the accountability of democratic systems. To date, democratic theorists and collective action scholars have stressed the relevance of monitoring by NGOs, social movement organizations, and alternative media to increase civil society’s watchdog potential, filter publicly relevant information, and ensure the inclusion of new voices and the representation of new instances in democratic arenas. However, little is known about how such diverse collective actors leverage monitoring practices, particularly in interaction with monitored actors and their constituencies. Focusing on the Spanish case (2011-2021), often considered a prominent example of monitory democracy, the study employs Situational Analysis and builds on semi-structured interviews and document analysis to discuss differences within the Spanish monitoring field. The results contribute to ongoing discussions on the hybridization of civic efforts and classifications of civic monitoring initiatives.

When Politics Determines Policy Success and Failure. A Comparison of Offshore Wind Power in Denmark and Spain

Why do some European countries succeed in developing offshore wind power? This study compares the Spanish and Danish cases from the 1970s to 2021. By completing the literature on both policy failure and success with concepts from psychology, the study stresses the relevance of public funding instability, federal architecture, intertwined political interests and policy discourse as dimensions that impact the rise of offshore wind power. Drawing on this framework, the Danish success suggests that strong leadership based on a shared objective can create efficient institutions able to avoid veto players and secure financial investments over time. This process can boost the rise of a self-confident discourse that will reinforce the virtuous circle.

“Knowledge is confused”: Rethinking pull factors in light of asylum and refugee integration policies

AbstractThe degree to which asylum or refugee integration policy influences a forcibly displaced individual's decision to settle in one European country versus another remains understudied, yet highly visible in policy and public debate. This work asks what explains this decision‐making via Spanish case study. The authors analyse 30 in‐depth interviews with persons seeking international protection from Spain combined with surveys among Spanish NGOs conducted in 2021. Main results firstly demonstrate that few individuals were previously aware of their intended destination's integration policies. Second, decision‐making affected by policies differs between individuals, related to socio‐demographic characteristics (origin country, age, gender). Third, EU policies serve as an auxiliary consideration. Finally, individual personal networks serve as the recurrent, principal pull factor. This paper contributes by highlighting that Spanish integration policies do not serve as a primary influence on decision‐making; instead, they serve as secondary or mediating factors, alongside the main factor of personal networks.

Visualising quantum innovation: A regional case study.

At the beginning of this century, the advent of a second generation of 'quantum technologies' was announced together with its revolutionary potential to change existing information technologies. Despite the rapidly increasing paid to quantum technological development, there has been little attention paid to the specific characteristics or relationships within emerging quantum ecosystems. The aim of this study is to visualize the innovation structures and relationships that are emerging to shape these technological developments. As these structures typically depend on specific regional features, we have specifically focused on the Spanish case, as it is potentially indicative of the differences between European innovation models and other regional patterns. This objective was achieved by researching the funding network of the ecosystem, collected from a systematic review of various official sources and relevant previous literature. The resulting dataset was framed using the Innovation Ecosystem model and broken down through network analysis theory, as well as characterized through descriptive statistics. This framework identified the significant role that projects play in European scientific and technological innovation, which work as hubs to concentrate resources and incentive cooperation between actors. This is relevant because current work on quantum technologies neglects their importance, as their analysis focuses on the quantity of institutions rather than their relations. Moreover, this paper points out the prominence of public funding to drive quantum innovation, largely stemming from the European Commission. This is another key mechanism that is missed by the existing literature. Finally, it also sheds light on the recipients of this funding, who are mostly research centres. These results allow us to conceptualize the Spanish quantum ecosystem and offer the opportunity for comparative studies with other quantum technologies ecosystems.

Deepening the understanding of redundancy procedures in a COVID-19 context: The Spanish case

AbstractThis paper investigates the use of redundancy procedures (RPs) by small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Spain during the COVID-19 pandemic. The novelty of this study is that it goes beyond the direct influence of the determinants of RPs on RP use, and analyses how the interactions among them moderate the direct effect. In contexts of rising uncertainty, businesses need to adapt their operations and fixed costs, including staffing. While teleworking is an alternative to RPs, our results show that it was not enough to deal with the negative impact of a worsening crisis. Moreover, when the survival of the business is at stake, the use of RPs increases further when the company is simultaneously affected by changes in demand and liquidity issues. We argue that our results reveal the need for flexible tools along with the policies that take into account the fact that businesses' reactions are contingent on their exposure to risk.

A comprehensive methodology to construct standardised datasets for Science and Technology Parks

This work presents a standardised approach to create datasets for Science and Technology Parks (STPs), facilitating future analysis of STP characteristics, trends and performance. STPs are the most representative examples of innovation ecosystems. The ETL (extraction-transformation-load) structure was adapted to a global field study of STPs. A selection stage and quality check were incorporated, and the methodology was applied to Spanish STPs. This study applies diverse techniques such as expert labelling and information extraction which uses language technologies. A novel methodology for building quality and standardised STP datasets was designed and applied to a Spanish STP case study with 49 STPs. An updatable dataset and a list of the main features impacting STPs are presented. Twenty-one (n = 21) core features were refined and selected, with fifteen of them (71.4 %) being robust enough for developing further quality analysis. The methodology presented integrates different sources with heterogeneous information that is often decentralised, disaggregated and in different formats: excel files, and unstructured information in HTML or PDF format. The existence of this updatable dataset and the defined methodology will enable powerful AI tools to be applied that focus on more sophisticated analysis, such as taxonomy, monitoring, and predictive and prescriptive analytics in the innovation ecosystems field.

Exploring land use dynamics in rural areas. An analysis of eight cases in the Global North

Rural areas are pivotal in the global economy, hence rural development planners and decision makers face significant technical and information management challenges, hindering their ability to assess sustainable development and formulate strategies. These challenges, coupled with shifts in traditional rural activities, aging populations, and climate change impacts, create inequalities and threaten rural communities. Therefore, developing approaches for the assessment of changes in rural areas are required. In recent years, remote sensing has emerged as a useful tool for monitoring the complex dynamics of rural regions, with a notable increase in the accessibility and use of freely available satellite data and platforms for tracking changes in land use and land cover (LULC). In light of this trend, this article analyzes the spatio-temporal trends in eight different development regions in Japan, Germany, Poland and Spain and integrates them with population data. This research relied on the utilization of openly available datasets - satellite imagery from Landsat and WorldPop population data, processed in Google Earth Engine (GEE). The time series of Landsat imagery were employed to analyze changes in LULC over a 20-year period from 2000 to 2020 in each test site. Unique combinations (i.e. each pixel history) were systematically examined and categorized based on established rules, with improbable scenarios marked as "uncertain." The comparison demonstrates that all eight regions have unique spatial, temporal and thematic characteristics. The most significant changes observed include the transformation of tree-covered areas into built-up areas in the case of Tsukuba and into agricultural lands in Shibushi. In the Bodzentyn and Połaniec communes in Poland, agricultural lands have transitioned into forested areas. In Spain, there is an increase in built-up areas, particularly at the outskirts of established towns. In Germany, the results indicate an expansion of built-up and agricultural areas in the Fürth region, while the Regen region experienced an increase in agricultural land. Incorporating population data reveals relationships between different types of LULC conversions and population trends, showing clear positive trends in areas transformed from agricultural and tree-covered land to built-up areas, with the most profound changes observed in Spanish cases and Tsukuba. The findings from automatic LULC classification highlight the usefulness of this tool in identifying socio-economic changes, especially when it is integrated with and compared to statistical data. Policy makers and planners at local levels should consider these specific values as a foundational reference point for shaping their plans related to sustainable development, land use, environmental preservation, and resource management.