Investigations into regional infrastructure equipments

The regional scientist and the practitioners' concern with infrastructure as an important and possibly decisive element in regional development is increasingly growing. Most of the still rare empirical studies deal with specific types of infrastructure equipments such as water management or communication systems. Theoretical insight, on the contrary, suggests a specific importance of certain ‘bundles’ of infrastructure equipments. However, an empirical basis of such arguing is still missing.

The present paper describes the approach and some first results of a broadly conceived test of complex bundles of infrastructure equipments. The data were collected for 64 supposedly rather homogeneous rural countries of Western Germany and processed by factor analytical methods.