Regionale Potentiale – Bedeutung und Nutzung von Potentialfaktoren in den NUTS 3 Regionen Deutschlands und Österreichs

The paper at hand compares the relative importance of modern transport infrastructure for the regional development with the relevance of other region specific factors such as telecommunication networks, educational attainments, centrality and the potential for natural and technological hazards. Since these factors strongly determine the regions’ potential economic performance, they are often referred to as potential production factors. It can be assumed that the regions’ dependence on potential production factors varies for different type of regions. Therefore, the Austrian and German NUTS 3 regions are first subdivided into three types according to their land use pattern. In a next step a quasi-production function can be defined for each regional type. Taking into account type-specific elasticities and the regions’ endowment with potential production factors, the quasi-production function then identifies the regions’ potential economic performance. Finally, a comparison of the regions’ potential with their real performance shows how efficient the potential production factors are used. While an over-average efficiency points to a bottleneck regarding the immobile factors, the performance of under-average efficient regions could best be enhanced by attracting more private capital. Copyright Springer-Verlag 2008