Local Impacts of Dominant Companies and the Level of Dominance

Abstract

One of the most important categories of local impact studies is the investigations about the roles of a large company in the life of a small and medium-sized towns. The first part of this paper analyses this question on a conceptual, theoretical level and by the help of literature review. A systematic overview will be given on the different roles of big companies, such as in the field of economy, labour market, infrastructure, land use, traffic, local services, local taxes, demography, culture, milieu, lifestyle, politics, education, tourism and others. There can be both positive and negative side of the dominance, for example local labour market can be more stable and more vulnerable at the same time. There is a scarcity of the empirical research on these questions, mainly due to the complexity and the business secret character of some detail. The second part of the paper gives a comparative analysis about the role of Audi Hungary Company in the western Hungarian medium-sized town, Győr, which is the sixth biggest settlement in Hungary. It is an interesting test case, because the role and importance of the Audi is significantly larger than in other big companies in similar city size category in Hungary, but its weight is not extremely large in international comparison.