Regional development by a lead firm in Austria: An analysis of economic, social and political factors

​​1. Case study: Development research in a peripheral region of an industrialized country

This article studies the developmental experience of an Austrian region, marked by unprecedented expansion of output and employment mainly driven by one large corporation and its satellite businesses.¹¹Due to privacy reasons and the requirements of data protection regulations, names of people, towns, municipalities, regions, the county and companies are anonymized, exchanged with pseudonyms or deleted. Thus, all names are fictional and any similarity with persons, towns, municipalities, regions, counties and companies are purely accidental. This is necessary to protect interview partners who helped this research project immensely by assisting with their experience and knowledge which could not be obtained any other way. Interviews were held in German, hence, all presented quotes were translated by the author. With sales figures tripling and employees more than doubling within just 9 years (2008-2017), the corporation acted as economic accelerator and created major spill overs pushing the region surrounding it out of economic misery.²²Henceforth, the leading corporation is also referred to as "LC". In fact, the area’s GRP grew by over 90% between 2000-2016 and the 13 municipalities under investigation show an approximately 20% higher employment rate in 2014 than 2001 while population grew by 9% in the same period.³³The 13 municipalities are also labelled "focus municipalities" (Statistik Austria, 2019a; 2019b; 2019c). Additionally, council tax ("Kommunalsteuer") inflow has increased by staggering 180% between 2010 and 2017 in just one municipality, and 73% for all municipalities included in the study, equipping them with financial means to improve public provision e.g. by building kindergartens (County-data base).⁴⁴As abovementioned, for reasons of data protection, the county and with it the county-data base cannot be specified.