Search

This paper presents initial findings on the establishment of a social logistics project in a peripheral rural region in Germany. As part of a real-life laboratory, two services were developed and tested with the aim of improving rural supply: the delivery of regional goods and the return of online orders in cooperation with a regional public transport provider, regional retailers and parcel services. An evaluation team provided support to the project in identifying, monitoring, and documenting the societal impact of the services and promoted impact-oriented project management. The concept of providing services of general interest through social logistics and testing them in a real-world laboratory was based on preliminary work in the region. The results indicate that this approach can promote this type of social logistics in the long term. A social logistics approach does not focus solely on economic aspects but emphasises social and environmental benefits for the region. A real-world laboratory approach enables an environment that promotes open exchange, involvement of different stakeholders and joint problem solving in a reflective, iterative process. This methodological approach enabled the continuation and out-scaling of the service's core offerings immediately after ending the test phase and is seen as an important prerequisite for establishing a long-term perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper examines the extent to which sectoral diversification can act as an insurance mechanism against fluctuations in regional gross value‐added growth rates. Portfolio theory is applied to the growth‐instability properties of German districts. Furthermore, a comprehensive diversification measure is defined. Stochastic Frontier Analysis is deployed in order to estimate whether diversification allows regions to achieve more efficient growth‐instability combinations. The results confirm that diversification does generate such effects. Spatial interactions do also play a role: The effects are less pronounced for regions whose economic performance is mainly driven by the surrounding regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In discussions about the use of public money for popular sports such as clubs in Germany’s 1. Bundesliga, it is often argued that the funds are well invested due to the cash flows generated by these organizations for their home regions. However, others claim the opposite. They argue that actually no positive impact is generated and, even worse, that money is leaving the region due to the clubs. The study presented here analyses the financial flows generated by the 1. FC Kaiserslautern for its home city (Kaiserslautern) and home state (Rhineland-Palatinate) during the 2010/11 season when the club participated in the 1. Bundesliga. Based on a 3-step model, the economic impact is calculated by considering spectator spending and cash flows generated by the business activities of the club. It turns out that additional cash flows of approximately €16.5 million and €25.8 million were generated for the state and the city, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers an exploratory investigation of the effects of inbound commuter flows on employment in regional labour markets in Germany. For this purpose, the paper distinguishes three main channels that may transmit the effects concerned: a crowding-out mechanism and two labour demand effects—namely, an aggregate demand effect and a positive externality on vacancy creation. The results bring to light that, on the whole, commuter flows have a positive and robust effect on both employment and the number of jobs in the receiving labour market districts, but a distinctly negative effect on the share of jobs filled by resident workers. The implications of the results are interpreted and, finally, ways are suggested in which the analysis could be improved and expanded. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores the pattern of land rents and agricultural productivity across nineteenth-century Prussia to gain new insights on the causes of the “Little Divergence” between European regions. We argue that agriculture reacted to urban and industrial development rather than shaping it. In the spirit of Johann von Thünen and Ernst Engel, we develop a theoretical model to test how access to urban demand affected agricultural development. We show that the effect of urban demand is causal and that it is in line with recent findings on a limited degree of interregional market integration in nineteenth-century Prussia. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Since the end of the 1990s cultural and creative industries have generated increasing attention in academic, public and political discourse. Nowadays, these industries are seen to be important factors of regional development. Because an urban environment offers a special quality of place, which is stimulating, motivating, challenging and inspiring for creative people, cultural and creative industries are spatially highly concentrated in the major cities of each country. Furthermore, urban places have an advantage compared to more peripheral or rural regions by offering the creative talents particular surroundings with openness, diversity, tolerance and internationality to realize their individual life styles. Overall, it can be assumed, that the cultural and creative industries fulfil their role as engines of innovation, growth and increasing employment rates predominantly in major cities. The empirical analysis of regional employment shifts in the cultural and creative industries in Germany shows that the main hubs of the cultural and creative industries in Germany generated above-average growth rates between 2003 and 2008. The more rural regions declined in most cases against the overall employment growth of the cultural and creative industries in Germany by 5.0%. Hence, the peripheral regions afar from the urban cores could not benefit from the growth of cultural and creative industries. Furthermore, a shift analysis shows the importance of locational effects in explaining the regional employment dynamics in these industries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rising focus of politicians as well as scientists in the EU on the large urban agglomerations as centres of economic growth is accompanied by political efforts to identify and to demarcate such agglomerations under the label ‘metropolitan regions’. This study develops a theoretical framework broaching the issue of cooperation between municipalities from the perspective of regional economics as well as political science. The framework is applied to the empirical case of the polycentric metropolitan region of the ‘Saxony triangle’ in east Germany. The results show that various intervening factors prevent intense co-operation between the actors in the region. Policy implications and conclusions for future research are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Much of the recent worldwide trend towards devolution has been driven by the belief that fiscal decentralisation is likely to have a positive effect on government efficiency and economic growth. It is generally assumed that the transfer of powers and resources to lower tiers of government allows for a better matching of public policies to local needs and thus for a better allocation of resources. These factors, in turn, are expected to lead to an improvement in regional economic performance, if subnational authorities shift resources from current to capital expenditures in search of a better response to local needs. In this paper we test these assumptions empirically by analysing the evolution of subnational expenditure categories and regional growth in Germany, India, Mexico, Spain, and the USA. We find that, contrary to expectations, decentralisation has coincided in the sample countries with a relative increase in current expenditures at the expense of capital expenditures, which has been associated with lower levels of economic growth in countries where devolution has been driven from above (India and Mexico), but not in Spain, where it has been driven from below. We hypothesise that the differences in legitimacy between the central or federal government and subnational governments in top-down and bottom-up processes of devolution may be at the origin of the diverse capacity to deliver greater allocative and productive efficiency and, eventually, greater economic growth by devolved governments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops and applies neural network (NN) models to forecast regional employment patterns in Germany. Computer-aided optimization tools that imitate natural biological evolution to find the solution that best fits the given case (namely, genetic algorithms, GAs) are also used to detect the best NN structure. GA techniques are compared with more `traditional' techniques which require the supervision of experienced analysts. We test the performance of these techniques on a panel of 439 districts in West and East Germany. Since the West and East datasets have different time spans, the models are estimated separately for West and East Germany. The results show that the West and East NN models perform with different degrees of precision, mainly because of the different time spans of the two datasets. Automatic techniques for the choice of the NN architecture do not seem to outperform selection procedures based on the supervision of expert analysts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The distribution of European and national aid among 271 German labor market regions is considered as an optimization problem with three targets: (i) interregional equalization of unemployment rates; (ii) minimization of total (national) unemployment; and (iii) maximization of GDP, subject to budget constraints and some administrative restrictions. The analysis of the German program in 2000–2002 shows that the results actually obtained for 6 billion euro required only 241 million euro under optimal planning (4% of the actual budget). Such an inappropriate implementation of active labor market policies can be the cause of low efficiency, often misinterpreted as uselessness. This paper suggests a decision aid for optimal planning and shows that tax returns from the additional GDP due to jobs subsidized can transform regional policy into a winning governmental strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Regional financial arrangements and monetary integration in East Asia and Europe have made considerable progress in recent years. This paper discusses whether governments in both regions, Japan and Germany as the most advanced regional economies in particular, can use the new dynamics as levers to raise their status vis-à-vis the United States. It will be argued that activities are defensive rather than offensive, aiming at protecting the respective region from financial risk. Japan, in particular, would find it difficult to raise its status vis-à-vis the United States significantly by promoting regional financial and monetary integration, principal reasons being actor heterogeneity, the role of China, hesitation to bear burden and risk, and the historical legacy of a bank-oriented system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As trust is essential for close mutual cooperation, trust between entrepreneurs running SMEs (small and medium-sized enterprises) has been increasingly acknowledged as an important factor in regional economic development. However, one of the main problems of post-socialist economies is that the increased need for entrepreneurial trust is thwarted by conditions discouraging the creation of trust. In order to investigate this problem, an empirical study was carried out among 1CT entrepreneurs in eastern Germany to examine the main aspects of trust identified in the recent literature on SMEs and entrepreneurship. The findings revealed that although barriers impeding the emergence of inter-entrepreneurial trust do not necessarily exist in a lagging, transforming region such as eastern Germany, its development may prove more difficult than elsewhere. Problems can be attributed to 'legacies of socialism' in the knowledge patterns of `post-socialist entrepreneurs' and, more importantly, their perception of a general lack of market power. However, actual problems of building entrepreneurial trust can usually be resolved by careful reflection on the part of those concerned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current academic discussions on economic development make a case for 'regional governance' in city-regions and stress the importance of varying institutional and policy-making frameworks for country-specific interpretations of 'regionalization'. This article will look at the evolution of forms and structures of regional governance in two of the main urban regions in western Europe, London and Berlin. They have been chosen for their underlying structural-geographic comparability, including their international outlook and awareness of competitiveness, while at the same time representing quite different constitutional and institutional arrangements for territorial governance in general, and that for city regions in particular. Nevertheless, as shown in this article, there appears to be the common challenge of an institutional lag in the adjustment of city-regional government to the imperatives of regional economic competition. This may even go as far as institutional arrangements not only being ineffective but obstructive to the development of city-regional governance through in-built support of localist or institutionalist ambitions. Drawing new boundaries between territories of institutional responsibilities, establishing institutional 'performance targets' or fiscally rewarding inter-local competition, are just some of the obstacles to building effective city regional governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]