The agglomeration of industries has recently received much interest both in empirical and theoretical work. Especially in Germany politicians became inspired by the notion of high-technology industry clusters, and regional policy has seen a wave of initiatives aiming at the formation of such clusters. This paper explores in a systematic way the geographic concentration of German manufacturing industries and relates it to industry characteristics and agglomeration forces proposed by theory. The main finding is that there is no general relationship between agglomeration and high-technology related business which suggests that hope put in the fast and effective development of "high-tech" clusters might see some disappointments in the future.
Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. The working papers published in the Series constitute work in progress circulated to stimulate discussion and critical comments. Views expressed represent exclusively the authors' own opinions and do not necessarily reflect those of the editors. We adopt a Panel VAR approach to identify the feedback effects among the variables and analyse the dynamic properties of the system through impulseresponse functions. We also use the model to track the evolution of the particular East-West migration since re-unification aiming to shed more light on the East German "empirical puzzle", characterized by lower migration responses than expected from the regional labour market position relative to the West. We indeed get evidence for such a puzzle throughout the mid-1990s, which is likely to be caused by huge West-East income transfers, a fast exogenously driven wage convergence and the possibility of East-West commuting. However, we also observe an inversion of this relationship for later periods: That is, along with a second wave of East-West movements around 2001 net flows out of East Germany were much higher than expected after controlling for its weak labour market and macroeconomic performance. Since this second wave is also accompanied by a gradual fading out of economic distortions, this supports the view of "repressed" migration flows for that period.
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Documents inJEL Classification: C33, J61, R23
In this article, we apply recent advances in quasi-experimental estimation methods to analyze the effectiveness of Germany’s large-scale regional policy instrument, the joint Federal Government/State Programme “Gemeinschaftsaufgabe Verbesserung der regionalen Wirtschaftsstruktur” (GRW), which is a means to foster labor-productivity growth in lagging regions. In particular, adopting binary and generalized propensity-score matching methods, our results indicate that the GRW can be generally considered effective. However, we find evidence for a nonlinear relationship between GRW funding and regional growth associated with a maximum subsidy level beyond which financial support does not generate further labor-productivity growth. In other words, there is a “purchase limit” on regional growth. Although the matching approach is very appealing due to its methodological rigor and didactical clarity, throughout the empirical application, we faced difficulties in balancing the set of covariates among treated and comparison regions, given that two sets of the regions differ strongly with respect to their underlying structural characteristics. Such imperfect balancing may limit the practical applicability of matching techniques in regional data settings. Overall, however, the matching approach can still be considered of great value for regional policy analysis and should be the subject of future research efforts in the field of empirical regional science.
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