Local Implementation-Capacity Frictions in Baden-Wuerttemberg

This project asks where regional policy in Baden-Wuerttemberg is most likely to get stuck at the local implementation stage. The empirical object is a reproducible county-year diagnostic for the state’s 44 counties and urban counties over 2007-2024.

The live hierarchical State Capacity Friction Index summarizes administrative, infrastructure, and fiscal frictions on a fixed calibration scale. Transformation pressure is estimated separately, so the index does not simply rank places by urbanity, industrial structure, or fiscal stress. The data combine official regional, fiscal, labor-market, construction, accessibility, census, and traffic indicators with a public-source audit of administrative validation targets.

The current evidence suggests that county scores vary substantially without significant contiguity clustering and without simply reproducing urbanity or industrial exposure. Higher scores are most consistently associated with weaker subsequent construction outcomes, although that relationship weakens when construction indicators are removed from the index. I therefore interpret H-SCFI-Live as a transparent screen for identifying where direct administrative diagnosis and better data are most needed.

Current manuscript: non-peer-reviewed working paper.