Indicator: Goods Trade Border effect

The border-effect index shows the region's dependence on international relations. For our border-effect analysis, we abandoned the basket approach. The reasons are as follows: (1) a country’s size and the number and density of its NUTS 2 regions have a decisive impact on the indicator, which distorts its universality and comparability for the entire ESPON space at the basket level; (2) for Erasmus student flows, intra-country flows do not exist, so our analysis looks at only two knowledge flows (H2020 and patents).
The obvious conclusion from the analysis is that small countries are more dependent on foreign flows than large countries. Moreover, border regions are usually subject to a greater exchange of international flows than central regions, the most remote from the border. Thus, it is particularly interesting to com-pare large countries in the ESPON space.
An analysis of flows of goods trade and goods freight shows that the key to internationalization of re-gions for trade is proximity to the European core. Regions that in a given country are located on the bor-der with a country closer to the European core are more open to international trade within the ESPON space. This applies also to countries located in the European core, where a particularly large share of international trade is on the Franco-German border. The above conclusion, however, especially applies to countries such as Poland, Romania, and Hungary (although in the last case it is mainly the specificity of goods freight). Thus proximity to the European core tends to increase the share of international trade in the exchange of goods on a regional basis.
The situation is different in Scandinavia, where the northern parts of Sweden, Norway, and Finland, being particularly far from the European core, have relatively strong international trade ties (mainly with neighbouring countries). In Spain, the region that belies the conclusions of our analysis is Andalusia, where, despite significant distances to other countries in the ESPON space, the share of international flows in the flows of goods traffic is particularly high, especially by tonnage (goods freight).