Ownership, Trust and Location Attractiveness: Institutional Stability in the Conflict Between Regulation and Expropriation

Secure property rights are considered a central foundation of economic development. However, their importance for location attractiveness is often reduced to legal or purely economic aspects. This paper analyses the relationship between property security, institutional trust and location attractiveness from an institutional and governance-oriented perspective. The central thesis is that economic performance is influenced less by regulation as such than by the predictability and credibility with which property rights are protected over time. Based on an analytical framework that integrates institutional economics approaches, the Austrian school and legal theory perspectives, trust is conceptualised as a mediating institutional variable. Trust links property security with investment decisions, capital movements and innovation dynamics. Methodologically, the study follows a qualitative research design that combines conceptual analysis, contrastive case logic and secondary data from international organisations such as the OECD and the World Bank. Trust is operationalised through proxies such as investment behaviour, risk premiums and capital mobility. The results show that stable and predictable property rights strengthen institutional trust and increase location attractiveness, while erratic or discretionary interventions undermine trust and weaken investment incentives. Regulation proves to be an institutional touchstone rather than a locational disadvantage. Consistency, transparency and reliability over time are decisive for its economic impact. Keywords: trust, institutions, regulation, location attractiveness, resilience, property.