Breaking Down the Border: Physical, Institutional and Cultural Obstacles

Roberta Capello, Andrea Caragliu and Ugo Fratesi

Economic Geography, 2018, vol. 94, issue 5, 485-513

Abstract: The literature on borders as barriers to economic growth presents some weaknesses in conceptualizing and measuring border effects due to obstacles of different nature (e.g., physical, institutional, and social/cultural). This article aims at overcoming this limitation by demonstrating that political borders actually comprise several lines of fracture in the continuity of socioeconomic space. As such, border effects must be decomposed into their building blocks in order to more clearly identify the sources of border-related inefficiencies and enact appropriate policies. By applying an original methodology, the article analyzes the extent to which different types of barriers create obstacles to different growth assets. Results applied to European cross-border regions on a newly collected database at NUTS3 level suggest that (1) physical obstacles hamper several types of economic interactions; (2) sociocultural barriers limit the exploitation of intangible assets; and (3) social and cultural barriers limit the access to intermediate goods and to geographically close labor markets. Evidence-based policy implications call for the identification of the sources of these discontinuities, of the real cost that they engender, and of the type of growth assets hampered in their exploitation by the presence of a border.

Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/00130095.2018.1444988 (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:recgxx:v:94:y:2018:i:5:p:485-513

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/recg20

DOI: 10.1080/00130095.2018.1444988

Access Statistics for this article

Economic Geography is currently edited by James Murphy

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