The impact of territorial resources on the firm productivity: toward a firm-based or a regional-based development? The case of Wallonia

The aim of our paper is to expose some territorial evidence from a model explaining the firm productivity in Wallonia, the Southern region of Belgium. This model is a part of our PhD-thesis project aiming to estimate the impact of territorial resources on the firm performance in Wallonia. Like many other European regions, Wallonia faces up to some challenges related to the regional development: firm location is largely structured by agglomeration economies, generating some economic disparities across the region, but public policies in the regional development field are more focused on infrastructure and inexpensive land supply for some decades (Gouvernement wallon, 2014; Vandermeer, 2016; Wilmotte & Halleux, 2018).
We have developed an econometric model in order to explain the productivity of Walloon SMEs by the intern features of the firm provided thanks to accounting data and by the access to territorial resources. By territorial resources, we mean the specific features of the territories that affect the ability of companies to develop their business. Our model illustrates the impact of several territorial resources with multi-scale effects: the key role of wages, the importance of location at European market scale, the effect of proximity to the first-rank cities (and not to the second-rank cities in the Walloon study case) and the lower impact of local infrastructures for the firm productivity. These results provide some contributions to the debate for regional development with the key role of agglomeration economies for the SMEs performance.