Die wirtschaftliche Wirkung der Universitäten im Land Baden-Württemberg

Abstract

The assessment of the economic impact of universities has received increasing political attention when it comes to the justification of public expenditure on research and higher education. While regional impact analyses have been realized mostly at the local level and for individual higher education institutions, this article is the first to assess the monetary impact of an entire higher education landscape at the geographical scale of a large federal state in Germany. To increase the validity of the impact at such a geographical scale, the assessment responds to a number of methodological problems of impact studies: The approach used here deploys an extended multiplier analysis accounting for production and income multipliers simultaneously, analyses the differential incidence of universities vis-à-vis alternative uses of public funds, and extends the model to include expenses for the social insurance system. In addition, the validity of the impact analysis is based on concisely regionalised public expenses for all nine state universities in Baden-Württemberg. As a result, the universities in Baden-Württemberg account for an overall impact of nearly twice the basic federal funding. The differential analysis demonstrates that the allocation of public funds to alternative uses hardly reaches comparable regional effects. This study contributes to the advancement of economic impact analysis of higher education landscapes at larger geographic scales rather than individual universities in their local contexts.