Industry vs Services: do enforcement institutions matter for specialization patterns? Disaggregated evidence from Spain
Series: Working Papers. 1812.
Author: Juan S. Mora-Sanguinetti and Rok Spruk.
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Abstract
We exploit historical differences in foral law to consistently estimate the contribution of the
quality of enforcement institutions to economic specialization across Spanish provinces in
the period 1999-2014. The distribution of economic activity in Spain as of today shows a
strong pattern of geographical specialization. Regions less specialized in manufacturing
(industry) and oriented to services sectors (Andalusia, Extremadura) in the south are compared
with industrialized/manufacturing regions in the north such as the Basque Country, Navarre
or Aragon. We construct province-level congestion rates across three different jurisdictions
(civil, labor and administrative) from real judicial data measuring the performance of the
Spanish judicial system over time, and estimate the effect of judicial efficacy on the share of
manufacturing and services in the total output. Using a variety of estimation techniques, the
evidence unveils strong and persistent effects of judicial efficacy on province-level economic
specialization with notable distributional differences. The provinces with a historical experience
of foral law are significantly more likely to have more efficient enforcement institutions at the
present day. In turn, greater judicial efficacy facilitates specialization in high-productivity
manufacturing while greater judicial inefficacy encourages service-intensive specialization. The
effect of judicial efficacy on economic specialization does not depend on confounders, holds
across a number of specification checks and appears to be causal. Lastly, the three
jurisdictions seem relevant to explain specialization, although the administrative jurisdiction
appears to have a more pronounced impact than the labor or civil jurisdictions.