Indicator: Patents 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.
Patents present a completely different spatial pattern from that of other flows. The domination of Ger-many is visible also in the context of patent internationalization. The spatial pattern in ESPON space shows very strong internal ties between the regions of Germany, while in other countries there are strong international ties. Such is the case also in Switzerland and Austria, whose involvement in the flow of patents is equally strong. Such large differences between Germany and the rest of the ESPON space in the internationalization of patent flows require further methodological and database work.