This work constitutes a contribution to the researches on the determinants of the attractivity of the enterprises in Douala. Indeed, the Competition undertaken by territories to attract and maintain enterprises supposes to have an efficient territorial organization and presenting advantages of localization for firms. What raises the problems of the governance and the country planning in the context of the territorial attractiveness reinforcement. By joining within the framework of theoretical analysis of the industrial economy and the territorial economy, this study proposes an analysis of the relation between the dynamic of the local governance an the territorial attractiveness of firms. In Douala, the dynamics of the governance can be perceived through the quality of the public and private regulation, but also through the presence of multiple institutions (formal and informal) who structure the economic system. From our theoretical and empirical developments, the local governance is put forward like a determining factor of the attractivity of firms in the Douala city. Much more, the econometric regression of our equation of the determinants of the attractivity using Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) reveals positive relations between the evolution of new business start-ups in the Douala city and the factors of the governance and certain factors of socio-economic natures of other share during the period 1996-2009.
However, at the moment or the regions of the world are made more and more competition for the attraction of firms, the local public and private authorities of the Douala city will have to lead adequate policies going in the direction of the purification of the business climate and the improvement of the firm’s environment, in particularly to attract more firms to their territory to landing in the problems of unemployment and also, to strengthen the local economic growth. The strategies to be deployed here necessarily pass by construction/rehabilitation of the infrastructures, the development of business parks (parks of enterprises, encouragement in the constitution of the localized productive systems), the improvement of the urban governance through the reinforcement of the Public-Private Partnership and the development of the inter-municipal cooperation.
Keywords : attractivity, local governance, territory, Douala, enterprises.