- Socio-Economic Impact Assessment of Investments: The Case of the Portuguese Northern Region   110 kb by    Malcata Rebelo, Emília | emalcata@fe.up.pt    Short Outline This paper proposes an innovative methodology to assess the socio-economic impacts of public investments to reinforce regional economic competitiveness, social cohesion and people’s wellbeing. It is applied to the Portuguese Northern Region. Abstract During the last 20 years the goals of the investment policies carried out on the Portuguese Northern Region – a Convergence Objective Region in the scope of the European Union framework – consisted of strengthening the regional economic competitiveness (within an increasingly internal and external adverse situation), promoting the social cohesion of the territory, and minimizing the environmental impacts of the projects, through requalification of natural resources and the quality of the urban, periurban and rural environments, as critical issues in peoples´ quality of life. This region has, consequently, received prominent investments in public infrastructures. However, their effects on the economic development and on social wellbeing are currently being questioned. The goal of the research reported in this paper consists in the proposal of an innovative methodology to assess the socio-economic impact of these investment projects - their contribution to the reinforcement of the regional economic competitiveness, social cohesion and people’s quality of life. The methodology to assess the socio-economic impacts pursued in this research considers a set of medium and long term impacts of investments. It resorts to auto-regressive vectors in order to evaluate and quantify the relevance of performed investments, and their effects on other macroeconomic variables (gross domestic product, private investment, and employment), and its productivity, elasticity, and profitability. It additionally crosses these impacts with the identified social weaknesses/critical factors. This analysis conveys a more supported perception of the social utility of investments. This research is intended to contribute to surmount the “gap” between the traditional tools to evaluate investments and the new challenges faced by Regional Governance and Planning, through a reflection of the effective consequences of investment policies for populations. Keywords socio-economic impacts; public investments; competitiveness; social cohesion Case Study presented on the ISOCARP Congress 2012: Fast Forward: Planning in a (hyper) dynamic urban context   Click to open the full paper as pdf document   Click to send an email to the author(s) of this paper