Indicator: H2020 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.
The internationalization of knowledge flows related to the implementation of projects in the H2020 program is often rather random, especially in the case of peripheral and more autarkic regions. Few projects in peripheral regions of Poland and Romania are implemented with national or international partners, which makes the spatial pattern resemble a mosaic. On the other hand, the smaller countries of the ESPON space and the Scandinavian countries are definitely more evenly focused on international cooperation in H2020 projects.