The Effects of Special Economic Zones on Employment and Investment : Spatial Panel Modelling Perspective

We estimate the set of panel and spatial panel data models of employment and investments for 379 Polish counties over the period 2003-2012. We take advantage of a unique firm-level dataset for Polish Special Economic Zones (SSEs), which includes about 30,000 observations. We find that SSEs have substantial positive effects on employment: jobs in a given SSE create jobs outside the SSE in hosting county and even more jobs in neighbouring counties. Effect of SSEs on investments is weaker, but still positive. Investments in a given SSE neither crowd out nor crowd in investments outside the SSE. Thereby, they add one to one to capital stock in hosting county. Our findings are robust to changes in estimation methods, sample composition, set of explanatory variables and selection of spatial weight matrix