Indicator: Labour Mobility 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 compare large countries in the ESPON space.
In the case of labour mobility, it is difficult to generalize. Of course, there are areas with a high degree of daily labour mobility across national borders, such as the regions bordering Luxembourg, Scania (Malmo), and Copenhagen (ESPON METROBORDER, 2010). On the other hand, surprisingly high shares of foreign trips to work are recorded in regions farther away from national borders, such as Ro-mania and Spanish Andalusia. In many cases, however, these are units where the overall volume of labour mobility outside the region is very small and part of the labour mobility is unregistered migration or teleworking.