Keystone sector methodology:network analysis comparative study

Keystone sector methodology applied to Portugal

congestion costs in bigger cities. With new information technologies, highly-qualified
workers can make wider decisions about where they want to live and competition in
labor market will be also established in the basis of non-market factors like social
characteristics of the places. Towns with high levels of social capital will be more
likely to provide higher returns to business and workers. It is then important to look at
social aspects of regional development as a complement of other economic based
analysis.

Although social capital measurement still present some methodological
problems, we think that this methodology provides us an interesting contribute to fulfill
this gap.

Non-market oriented institutions are accessing the structure holes of low dense
networks, weakening the ability to obtain higher returns. Instead, US studies revealed
different structures where banks played the keystone role. The difference in returns is
obvious in consequence of the different goals; in fact, looking for profits is a
characteristic that fits firms and not non-market institutions. Still centralized and public
dependant hierarchies need different kind of policies.

However, external structural holes in the global competition arena need further
research, while we think that, a dense local structure is more likely to internalize the
opportunities of global structural holes.

Improving the methodology and empirical designs will certainly frame further
research and complement other economic approaches, which ignores the role played by
local actors in rural regions.

Surveys in the two neighbor towns, CC and GG, are being carried out in order
to enable a better understanding of the competitive opportunities in regional
polarization towns. In these surveys we will include inter-town questions, we will
specify the content of the links to understand internal and external interactions, and
doing so we intend to ameliorate the equity effects in the design of development
strategies for sparsely populated regions in the EU.

Finally it is important to state that inefficiency in Portuguese regional policy can
result from ignoring the knowledge about existent social structures. In fact, the
allocation of available European funds for rural regional development is done through
nationally imposed institutions rather than considering these locally based competitive
opportunities. If the lack of money revealed in small towns were offset by efficient

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