The impact of EU Eastern enlargement on urban growth and decline: New insights from Germany's Eastern border

Abstract

This paper uses the quasi‐experimental setting of the 2004 EU enlargement, as well as town‐level data along the affected German border, to estimate the effect of economic integration on border town population development. Using a difference‐in‐differences approach, we find that the accession has had a significant positive effect on the rate of population change after 2004. However, this does not offset the, generally, poorer population development of border towns compared to interior towns. Moreover, the integration effect appears to strongly depend on initial local conditions. No effects were found for Polish towns on the opposite side of the border.

The role of open borders and cross-border cooperation in regional growth across Europe

“…The empirical findings of Niebuhr (2004) and Petrakos and Topaloglou (2008) also supported the idea that Europe's more central border regions benefit more from macro-integration in comparison with its external border regions (bordering non-EU countries). More recently, Brakman et al (2012) and Heider (2019) also confirmed the spatial heterogeneity of integration effects on population growth. Brakman et al (2012) found a positive effect of EU enlargement along Europe's integrating borders, particularly for large regions and cities that are located within a 70 km range from national borders.…”

“…This paper argues that CBC is one main channel of such an impact, and moves on to test the significance of this impact by using INTERREG-funded CBC projects data from the EC's 2007-13 programming cycle. In doing that, it also makes use of panel data on regional gross value added (GVA) per capita, which is a more robust indicator of economic development compared with population as used in previous similar studies (Brakman et al, 2012;Heider, 2019).…”

Can it be too close? The impact of the proximity of the Polish-German border on local development in Poland in the process of European integration

“…However, conclusions drawn from empirical data describing Polish-German border regions are not congruent. Data on population changes suggest that the positive effect is only relevant for large towns, especially German cities specialising in services, but not for Polish municipalities (Heider 2018). Some analyses of the spatial distribution of the FDI inflow (at the beginning of the process) and accumulated value (in successive years of European integration) indicate that it has had a linear dependence on Polish-German border -the closer to the border the higher the investment attractiveness.…”

Where do immigrants move in Germany? The role of international migration in regional disparities in population development

“…Although we estimated a positive coefficient of the western border dummy on the migration rates of EU15 citizens, we did not find a similar effect regarding the migration of Eastern Europeans. This might be attributed to the fact that many of Germany's eastern border regions are among the structurally weakest in the whole country and partially suffer from drastic population decline (Heider, 2019a). Some of the western border regions, on the other hand, have achieved high levels of economic development due to long‐lasting cross‐border economic interaction (Topaloglou, Kallioras, Manetos, & Petrakos, 2005).…”