Lights along the frontier: convergence of economic activity in the proximity of the Polish-German border, 1992–2012

Ronny Freier, Michal Myck and Mateusz Najsztub

Applied Economics, 2021, vol. 53, issue 36, 4245-4262

Abstract: This paper studies regional economic development on the municipality-level in Poland and Germany along the Oder–Neisse border. We use high-quality satellite night-time light intensity data as an innovative and comparable measure to proxy for overall economic activity on both sides of the border consistently over a long period of time (1992–2012). We use descriptive heat maps as well as regression analysis to investigate two aspects: first, how far is the economic convergence along the Polish-German border? Second, what effect does the distance to the border have on economic activity as measured with light emissions? Our findings suggest that convergence in overall activity across the border has been complete. Polish municipalities that used to be economically much weaker have caught up with those on the German side of the Oder and the Neisse rivers. As regards the importance of distance, we highlight different results for Germany and Poland. While distance to the border never mattered significantly for German regions, Polish municipalities closer to the border used to be substantially worse off in the early 1990s but caught up with regions further to the east by the end of the period of our analysis.

Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/00036846.2021.1898534 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:applec:v:53:y:2021:i:36:p:4245-4262

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RAEC20

DOI: 10.1080/00036846.2021.1898534

Access Statistics for this article

Applied Economics is currently edited by Anita Phillips

More articles in Applied Economics from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().