European Market Integration, R&D Agglomeration Economies, and the Location Choice of Firms in Poland

Astrid Krenz and Agnieszka Gehringer ()

Eastern European Economics, 2015, vol. 53, issue 6, 491-513

Abstract: The establishment of a European common market, with the aim of eliminating internal barriers of different kinds, implies an environment in which standard location determinants for firm activities might operate differently than usual or in which new location forces assume importance. Poland has had an exemplary experience as a former planned economy that managed the transition to a market economy within a relatively short period of time. The country is characterized by comparatively low R&D expenditures per capita as well as few patent applications, as compared to other European Union countries in the past decade. Aside from the previous literature’s focus on industrial and service agglomeration economies, we investigate the impact of agglomeration economies stemming from the R&D sector and innovative activities for the location choices of firms in Poland. We also assess what role accession to the European Union played in this process. We use a panel data set comprising Polish NUTS II regions over the period 2003 to 2010. The analysis differentiates the effects for domestic, foreign, and entrepreneurial firms in the economy and enriches the former literature, which focused on the location decisions of FDI. We find a strong impact of R&D agglomeration economies for the location choices of all firms, a positive impact of EU membership on the location decisions of entrepreneurial firms, a positive impact of innovative activity for the location decisions of foreign firms, and a contingent effect of EU membership on the decisions of foreign firms to locate closer to the German-Polish border.

Date: 2015
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/00128775.2015.1102589 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:mes:eaeuec:v:53:y:2015:i:6:p:491-513

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/MEEE20

DOI: 10.1080/00128775.2015.1102589

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Eastern European Economics from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().