Regional institutions and economic growth of regions

The paper presents the results of literature research on the role of institutions in development. The paper refers to the new economic geography and its findings on the importance of immovable territorial assets for local and regional development. This observation also plays important role in so called place-based policy paradigm proposed by Barca. Institutions such as social norms, social capital, governance can be clarified as such type immovable assets that cannot be easily replicated in other parts of the words and form specific development milieu. This paper examines how the concepts of immovable resources (assets) has been used in formal growth models by the mainstream economics. Presented and discussed research efforts show that the institutions, according to leading economists, are an important determinant of economic growth. The growth models usually assume that institutions affect the size of resources (especially human capital) and their productivity. In these models, they are recognized as an element of total factor productivity or in the equations portraying the accumulation of factors of production. The main problem that makes research on the effects of institutions at the regional level are far from the conclusiveness, is the complexity of the same category, universal character of many institutions at least at country level and the difficulty in choosing the appropriate indicators for its measurement The paper uses the results of the project financed by the Polish National Science Centre “Concept of the territorial cohesion in cohesion policy. Implications for Economic Growth "(number 2012/05 / B / HS4 / 04212).