January 2006

The aim of the continuing research programme «Policy and Regional Growth» is an empirically sound contribution to the discussion of location factors and economic growth.

The results from Phase II show – among other things – that in most policy fields the direction of the influence on growth performance of a region confirms with the hypotheses. Phase II concentrated on the effects of location factors on regional productivity growth. Sometimes surprising are the different sizes of the effects of the different policy fields: Taxation shows a comparatively large impact on regional development, whereas indicators for innovation resources point in the expected direction, but influence growth only by small scale.