Regional growth regimes revisited : the case of West Germany

Audretsch and Fritsch (2002) proposed two explanations for the mixed evidence regarding the relationship between new firm formation and regional development. Firstly, they found evidence for the existence of long time lags needed before the main effects of new firm formation on employment change become evident. Secondly, they suggested that regions may be characterized by different growth regimes in which new firms and entrepreneurship assume different roles and accordingly lead to different effects. This paper reports the results of re-estimating the main relationships investigated by Audretsch and Fritsch (2002) in a somewhat different way. One main difference is that we now have information on a longer time-period available and have chosen shorter time intervals for the analysis. This enabled us to investigate the transition between different types of growth regimes in further detail. Furthermore, our analysis is not on the level of planning regions but on the level of districts ("Kreise") and we have explicitly accounted for spatial autocorrelation in the analysis, which turns out to be highly relevant.