Territorial capital – a fuzzy policy-driven concept: context, issues, and perspectives

Abstract

The interest in the concept of territorial capital has considerably increased in the past few years. The first goal of the study is to give an overview of the possible interpretations and elements of territorial capital. Second, it is aimed at giving a summary of the circumstances that have encouraged the emergence of the territorial capital approach. The third goal is to go beyond the description of current issues by presenting how the concept has been used to verify development issues, while also by highlighting some challenges of empirical investigations on the research topic. Finally, the chances that territorial capital will be used as a strategic planning approach is detailed in addition to a decision support tool. The main result of the study is an own view of the concept of territorial capital which synthesises the up till now state of the research issue and points out its potentials for both scholars and policy-makers.

The economic development of regions in Ukraine: with tests on the territorial capital approach

“…However, owing to the limitations in regard to the availability of data, the various dimensions (elements) of territorial capital had to made operational by a limitied number of variables. The dimensions of territorial capital are labelled according to, e.g., Tóth (2017). (1) The public capital (transport infrastructure) is approximated and made operational by means of the density of roads and railtracks (length of infrastructure per square km).…”

“…For instance, data on those regions that are affected by military conflicts are not available, or are not reliable. On the other hand, the availability of the data poses a restriction to the application of the full conceptual model of the territorial capital approach according to, e.g., Camagni and Capello (2008) or Tóth (2017). Some of the estimations may also suffer from multi-collinearity since the single elements of the territorial capital approach are not independent explanatory variables, but are determined in joint (policy) frameworks.…”

“…Empirically, the concept makes use of a much broader data base than other approaches by including several elements of 'capital' that are often not easily commensurable, or are not regularly reported in the national accounting systems on a regular (e.g., annual) basis for regions or territories. Tóth (2017) points out that territorial capital is a broad consideration and integration of local (endogenous) resources which could be used effectively in order to enhance regional competitiveness. The author emphasizes that the territorial capital concept, while conceptually well-defined, is also a broad concept that has to be made operational for an empirical test.…”

“…However, there are only a few papers on the empirical validity of the territorial capital approach for Central and Eastern European transition countries. Notable exceptions include Tóth (2017) and Jóna (2015a) for Hungary (see Sect. 2).…”

Utilizing endogenous potentials through EU cohesion policy: examples from Central Europe

“…ESPON, 2013a;Servillo, Atkinson, & Russo, 2012). Methodologically, while all approaches share the same basic understanding of what such place-based potentials or capitals are, they differ in regard to the applied qualitative or quantitative methods, these largely depending on the research focus (Lacquement & Chevalier, 2016;Tóth, 2017).…”