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Small communities coexisted with global processes seems to be more and more important in „new economy”. Challenges  to  territorial socio-economic systems provide a context  for  the development of entrepreneurship and require from local governments and other local and regional organisations to change their attitude and the way they operate. To adjust to a fast-changing economy, local government managers must adopt entrepreneurial and pro-efficiency attitudes, and at the same time inspire social initiative in the community. Efficient functioning of spatial units and their ability to build modern local structures that can use endogenous resources in an effective way improves their competitiveness. But in order to build such competitiveness, local governments must be able . and be eager . to stimulate entrepreneurship in their communities.  This can be done in the context of economic diversification, like in the example of Polkowice municipality, where economic changes have been anticipated and necessary actions taken to develop a service economy, including tourism and recreation sector.

Abstract:The paper tackles with a still somewhat underdeveloped aspect of regional competiveness which regards to spillover effects stemming from spatial proximity of highly competitive neighbors. Although spillover effects are well recognized in the literature, we focus more on inter-regional concentration of business activity when enterprises are located in a particular district which is not far from the agglomeration center but not the center itself. We check for statistical significance of spatial autocorrelation measures (local Moran's Ii statistic) in order to identify spillovers between districts in Central European countries (Germany, Poland, Czech Republic and Slovakia). We use variables indicating Knowledge Intensive Services (KIS), in particular hi-tech KIS and information and communication services (including computer science). We compare 2009 with 2015 to notice agglomeration dynamics. We observe statistically significant spillover effects in Central European countries in urbanization-type clusters as well as strengthening of the effect over time. Taking into consideration more detailed data for Poland we conclude that while hi-tech KIS mostly spill over to neighboring districts, the reverse pattern may be observed for computer science (programming and consultancy). One explanation is that this subsector relies on highly demanded workforce and a prestigious localization (in the agglomeration centers) works as a bargaining chip to attract programmers. In order to measure the spillover effects more precisely it is recommended to define and measure the neighborhood of agglomeration centers using localization of firms based on GPS coordinates instead of centroids (geometric means) of districts -as shown in example of Poland.

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