Impact of Recession on the Parameters of Quality of Regional Centres and their Attractiveness

This paper explores the findings regarding the impact of recession that began in 2008 in Slovenia to the chosen parameters of quality of regional centres, which are reflected in their attractiveness. We wanted to test the assumption of the impact of recession to the attractiveness of regional centres to both internal migration and commuting flows. To this end, an adjusted gravity spatial interaction model was developed by evaluating regression coefficients. We analysedthe impacts of population size, distance, employment, gross personal income, municipality revenue per capita, average price per square metre of apartments and houses, and age structure in the municipality pertaining to the decision to potentially migrate or commute related to the migration and choice of workplace in the regional centre. The impact of the recession was analysed by comparing the estimations of regression coefficients before the recession (2007) and duringthe recession (2011). It is shown that during the recession, internal migrations to regional centres increased considerably, while commuting to regional centres did not change significantly. We alsoshowed that during the recession, the impact of the distance to the decision to migrate to regional centres slightly increased, while the impact of the distance to the decision to commute did not changesignificantly. Notably, during the crisis the impact of municipality revenue per capita in the regional centre to the analysed flows changed the most: during the recession, the decision to migrate and/orcommute to 'more prosperous' regional centres is made more easily.In the future, it is to be expected that local self-governments will make more effort to consider how to attract taxpayers to their local community and hence enrich the community, while the analysis of theseparameters will become more significant for the individual levels of the local self-government. Gravity models, such as the one used here, include different indicators of attractiveness; however, the approachused in this case is, indeed, special due to its emphasis on the age structure and the associated challenges burdening both Europe and Slovenia today. In Europe and elsewhere, we have not come across such a case where the implications of the crisis would have been evaluated using this kind of model. To some extent, this was done within the ESPON ATTREG European project, where as a case study a partial analysis of the mentioned problem on the case of Slovenia was performed; however, at the time, the data on the situation in the crisis period were still scarce. In