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Die Digitalisierung ist als vielseitige Mehrzwecktechnologie der Motor zahlreicher Innovationen. Diese stärken langfristig die Nachfrage und mit dem Wachstum der Wirtschaftsleistung auch die realen Einkommen. Relativ zu den Spitzenreitern liegt Österreich aber hinsichtlich vieler Kennzahlen zur Digitalisierung zurück, wie z. B. die im internationalen Vergleich geringere private Nutzung modernster Breitbanddienste zeigt. In den Unternehmen erfolgt die Digitalisierung im Allgemeinen etwas rascher und entspricht meist dem europäischen Durchschnitt. Für eine gestaltende Rolle im digitalen Wandel wird daher ein bloßes "Mehr" an Investitionen nicht ausreichen, sondern ein breites Spektrum abgestimmter Initiativen (Innovation, Adoption, Ausbildung, Regulierung usw.) notwendig sein.

This report provides the analyses of four areas of structural reforms undertaken in Poland in the period 2013-2018, i.e.: Innovation and R&D, analysed in Part I, The availability of suitable labour supply and skills, analysed in Part II, The improved business (regulatory) environment, analysed in Part III, and Measures to foster business growth, such as "Strategy for Responsible Development", "Constitution for Business" and "Constitution for Science", which are the focus of Part IV. These four areas are interrelated. Strategic documents designed and approved in the years 2017-2018, such as "Strategy for Responsible Development", "Constitution for Business" and "Constitution for Science" created a framework for the conditions for conducting business activity in Poland. The regulatory environment for doing business concerns the process of law making, which impacts not only the content of strategic documents and other legal acts, but also their quality. These two areas shape "the rules of the game" in the Polish economy and have an impact on the other two areas studied in this report, i.e., the labour market and research and innovation.

Urban sprawl is rapidly occurring in many Spanish urban areas. The objective of this paper is to evaluate how the trend of building dispersion of new residential areas may be affecting the fiscal stability of local governments in Spain. The wide diversity of the characteristics of Spanish urban areas as well as the existence of very similar local fiscal structures make this case particularly interesting. After delimiting the urban areas and the spatial unit of analysis, a precise index of urban sprawl, calculated with geo-referenced digital cartography, is used. Using the spatially disaggregated information of taxes from the Spanish National Institute for Fiscal Studies allows for a measure of fiscal burden by local areas and the ability to distinguish among types of taxes. Control variables are also available at the local level from the Spanish Census and other databases. Two methods, quantile regressions and ordinary least squares, are used in order to measure not only the average change but the heterogeneity across the distribution of the local fiscal burden associated with the changes in urban sprawl, whilst controlling for other explanatory variables in the model. The results indicate that higher levels of urban sprawl imply higher local fiscal burden. By tax categories, the phenomenon of urban sprawl particularly affects both local indirect and direct taxation. These results suggest that local decision-makers should consider urban planning as one of the fundamental tools to assure long-term local fiscal sustainability.

The international trade literature highlights the importance of firm productivity and economies of scale on the firm's international export success. In the context of agglomeration economies, firms enjoy productivity gains when they are located close to related firms and they gain from knowledge spill-overs and other positive externalities. They may also benefit from a potentially large supply of diverse workers that possess distinct knowledge and problem-solving skills. In such environments, firms may be more prone to export. In this paper, we employ a comprehensive German data set that combines survey and administrative data. We ask whether German firms (i.e., establishments) export more as a result of localisation and urbanisation externalities, and labour market pooling associated with workforce diversity, while controlling for a variety of establishment characteristics. Using a fractional response model, we provide evidence that manufacturers and smaller establishments benefit more from externalities and especially from knowledge spill-overs. There is less evidence supporting the benefit of workforce diversity; however, that factor may be associated with between-establishment variation.

This study presents a new firm- and project-level dataset containing data on over two million projects co-funded by the EU structural and cohesion funds in 25 EU member countries during the programming period 2007-2013. Information on individual beneficiary firms and institutions is linked with business data of Bureau van Dijk's ORBIS database. Moreover, text mining techniques are applied to categorise the EU cohesion policy projects into fifteen thematic categories. Stylised facts reveal substantial regional heterogeneity in the distribution of funds to certain projects and beneficiaries (with respect to their size or industry). Furthermore, regional funds distribution differs across less developed and higher-income as well as urban and rural regions. In an econometric analysis, we control for project and firm characteristics that we expect to determine the single project's value, which is confirmed by the results. Nevertheless, there remains unexplained variation in individual project volumes, which differs systematically across countries.

This paper explores the commuting paradox in the context of two-partner households by estimating the relationship between the subjective well-being of spouses and their commuting distances. Some of the former literature has found evidence that individuals are not fully compensated for changes in commuting (the commuting paradox). We study unitary, cooperative, and non-cooperative decision-making models to explore which describes the household decision on commuting in the data. We use panel data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP). The regressions show clear evidence for cooperative household decision making on commuting distances (time) and do not show evidence of the commuting paradox. These results are robust in several robustness checks, including alternative definitions of household utility.

We analyse the correlation of various measures of social capital with the willingness to migrate in 28 post-communist and five western European comparison countries using the Life in Transition Survey. Memberships in clubs and civil society organisations are substantially lower in post-communist countries than in the Western European countries. This is mainly due to the cohorts socialised prior to political reforms in the 1990's. Differences in endowments with this measure of social capital explain around 2.5 percentage points of the 9 to 11 percentage point difference in the willingness to migrate between the post-communist and comparison countries. Differences in contacts to friends and family, by contrast, contribute only little to explaining these differences. Furthermore, despite clear cohort effects in endowments with social capital between cohorts socialised during and after communist rule, there is no clear evidence of such cohort effects in the impact of social capital on the willingness to migrate.

This paper attempts to explain the seeming unresponsiveness of labour to react to economic disparities in terms of migration. In theory, the potential of workers to implicitly alleviate regional disparities in, for example, unemployment or wage levels by relocating appears potent, but finds little support empirically. To resolve this perplexity, a dynamic discrete choice model is used, which translates into a two stage estimation strategy for recovering structural parameters. Investigating Austrian bilateral movements on the NUTS 3 level from 2002 to 2014, the results suggest that this unresponsiveness builds on two pillars. First, estimated average migration costs are in the range of six times the average annual wage, which appears sizable enough to prevent taking advantage of economic opportunities for workers. These costs are shown to have decreased over time, though. Second, the relatively high variation in the random utility shifter can be interpreted as relative unimportance of regional disparities in forming migration decisions. Finally, a spatial approach on estimated regional valuations reveals an apparent "beauty contest" of regions, where regions' own valuations suffer from proximity to highly attractive ones.