Regional job-turnover and industrial policy. a note on a potential time pattern of regional industrial policies and their job effects – the case of the german city-state of bremen

Abstract

Many regions have experienced long-run economic fluctuations generated by the life cycles of their dominant industrial clusters. During the downswings in the 1970s and 1980s, proactive structural policies were typically launched in German regions to combat job losses in their core clusters and to create new jobs in new industries. With respect to the German State of Bremen, this paper provides empirical evidence of: (1) a long-run regional downswing; (2) the potential job effects of proactive regional industrial policy programmes in terms of increasing regional employment, by safeguarding jobs in the regional core industries and creating new jobs in new growth industries; and (3) a time pattern in the job effects, which are related to the different generations of programmes.

Keywords:

• Regional policy
• job turnover
• industrial policy
• job effects
• regional econometric analysis
• Bremen/Germany

Acknowledgements

The author is indebted to Sonja Ellmann and Inhi Yu for processing the data and generating the tables. He is grateful also to Udo Brixi and Mehmet Gürbüz for providing data, and to Thomas Knogge, Inhi Yu, Stefan Meyer and Ernst Moennich for helpful comments on an earlier version of the paper. The author would also like to thank two anonymous referees for their comments and Susan Schroeder for editing assistance. The paper is a product of a teaching and research sojourn of the author at the New School University, New York, during spring 2002. The author is grateful to the German Fulbright Commission and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) for funding this sojourn.