Land price diffusion across borders – the case of Germany

ABSTRACT

Land market regulations are often justified by the assumption that activities of foreign and non-agricultural investors drive up prices in domestic land markets. However, empirical knowledge about the dynamics of agricultural land prices across borders is sparse. Using the German reunification as a natural experiment, we study the effect of the former inner German border on the dynamics of agricultural land prices in East and West Germany. We apply a land price diffusion model with an error correction specification to analyse spatial agricultural land markets. A novel feature of our model is its ability to distinguish price diffusion within states and across state borders. We provide evidence for a persistent border effect given that the fraction of spatially integrated counties is larger within states than across the former border. Moreover, we observe non-significant error correction terms for many counties along the former border. From a policy perspective, it is striking to realize that even 25 years after German reunification, pronounced land price differences persist. It is quite likely that price diffusion through existing borders within the EU would take even more time given language barriers, different institutional frameworks, and information asymmetries between domestic and foreign market participants.     

Theorizing Borders: An Interdisciplinary Perspective

The current renewed interest in the study of borders and borderlands is paralleled by a growing concern and debate on the possibility of a border model, or models, and of a border theory, or theories. Certainly, there is a new attention to theoretical consideration and discussion that could help sharpen our understanding of borders. In this essay, I argue that a model or general framework is helpful for understanding borders, and I suggest a theory of borders. The seeds of my arguments are grounded in a variety of discussions and in the works of border scholars from a variety of social science disciplines. My contention is that the literature on borders, boundaries, frontiers, and borderland regions suggests four equally important analytical lenses: (1) market forces and trade flows, (2) policy activities of multiple levels of governments on adjacent borders, (3) the particular political clout of borderland communities, and (4) the specific culture of borderland communities. A model of border studies is presented in the second part of this essay, and I argue that these lenses provide a way of developing a model that delineates a constellation of variables along four dimensions.     

Cartopolitics,Geopolitics and Boundaries in the Arctic

Critical Border Studies emphasise how distinct political spaces are produced by borders. In this article I suggest that the order of this relationship should be reversed. I argue that space precedes and conditions the manifestation of borders. The argument is based on an understanding of cartography as a practice that mediates the relationship between space and borders. Drawing on Bruno Latour, I introduce the notion of cartopolitics to describe the process where questions pertaining to sovereign control over space are decided through cartography and law. In analysing current border practices in the Arctic, the term cartopolitics captures how the relationship between the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea and cartography is shaping the attempts by Arctic states to expand sovereign rights into the sea. The key is the continental shelf and how it is defined in law. In this process cartographic practices work to establish a particular spatial reality that subsequently serve as a basis for border making.     

Leave the Lemons at Home: Towards a Political Ecology of Border Space

This paper presents a political ecology approach to the study of borders through consideration of a lemon's travels in contemporary North American border space. Following discussion of recent work on the dynamic, multi-scalar, and process-based character of modern borders, I suggest that such critical approaches could be usefully augmented by drawing on ideas about socio-material networks advanced by Bruno Latour. By adopting a political ecology framework, border scholars would be able to consider more fully the materiality of borders and bordering processes. Through the example of the lemon, I demonstrate that in constructing the fruit as a particular socio-material artifact that embodies multiple threats to US national space, it and its carrier become implicated in the regulation of political-economic and geopolitical networks that are seemingly far removed from the object of concern.     

The Border as a Marker of Territoriality: Multi-Scalar Perspectives and Multi-Agent Processes in a South American Borderland Region

The ambivalence of borders, as both bridges and barriers, is analysed in the South American borderlands, in the cross-border region between Bolivia, Peru and Brazil. The main hypothesis behind this work is that borders not only refer to the state but they are also a result of a social construction. Through their practices and narratives, the actors involved shape the border configuration. Through a multi-scalar approach (from a continental to a local level) and by collating practices and representations of various social agents (from continental organisations to the complexity of social groups on the border), I show that different territorial complexes converge on the border and I explain the spatial dialectic of the latter. Two ideas emerge as a conclusion to this study: the co-existence of territorialities that are not so exclusive and the key role played by the state despite the changes it undergoes.     

Spatial effects of open borders on the Czech labour market1

Using data from the Czech Microcensus, I investigate differences in the regional impact of open borders on different skill groups in the Czech labour market. According to my results, there are no indications of disproportionate shifts in the skill structure of employment in the districts neighbouring western Germany and Austria compared to non‐border districts. However, regarding spatial wage gaps, I find evidence that from 1996 until 2002 the workers in the border region with the lowest degree of skills have a positive wage differential compared to their counterparts in the non‐border region, while all other skill groups in the border region have negative values.     

The role of borders,languages, and currencies as obstacles to labor market integration

Based on a modified spatiotemporal autoregressive (STAR) model, we analyze whether borders still constitute significant impediments to labor market integration in the European Union, despite the formal law of free movement of labor. Using regional data from the EU-15 countries over 21 years, we find that this is the case. We further investigate whether the abolishment of border checks through the Schengen agreement or the introduction of the Euro improved our measure of labor market integration across borders, and do not find evidence in favor. Last, we investigate the role of languages, and potentially cultures, as obstacles to labor market integration. We find that indeed language borders play a larger role than country borders in explaining the lack of labor market integration across borders.     

Borders and distance in knowledge spillovers: Dying over time or dying with age?—Evidence from patent citations

This paper explores the effects of distance as well as subnational and national borders on international and intranational knowledge spillovers through patent citations across the 39 most patent-cited countries and 319 metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) within the U.S. In contrast to previous findings that knowledge localization fades over time, border and distance effects increase over time for the same-age citations. This increasing effect of borders and distance is associated with strengthened knowledge agglomeration over time. Nevertheless, both border and distance effects decrease with the age of patents. Aggregate border effects are often overestimated due to various aggregation bias. Moreover, business travels and knowledge quality effectively attenuate the effect of subnational borders in knowledge flows.     

EU-Russian Border Crossing: The Dialogical Perspective

Mainstream post-positivist approaches to Border Studies typically represent national borders as losing their importance or blurring. This insight usually fails to grasp the perspective of those who have to cross ‘hard’ borders, for whom these borders are primarily ‘hard facts’ quite precisely restricting territorial limits of their movement. Aiming to take this perspective and practical problems experienced by such border crossers into account, the author proposes an approach focusing on communication between those who cross ‘hard’ borders and those who protect these borders. The case of the EU-Russian border shows that border crossers have an increasing range of options to make themselves heard by their own country's officials, though it is much more difficult for them to reach gatekeepers and public on the other side of the border without resorting to intermediaries (such as their states or business actors). The author suggests that border crossers could be heard better if cross-border cooperation initiatives would prioritise this purpose thus making the EU's external borders not only ‘friendly’ or ‘blurred’ but also ‘dialogic’.     

From Sovereignty to Imperium: Borders,Frontiers and the Specter of Neo-Imperialism

Borders are changing in myriad and multifaceted ways. After 9/11, states redoubled efforts at shoring up their perimeters and building walls. But borders are not merely increasingly securitized, they are also becoming thicker and bi-national. This new ‘zonal’ border emerging worldwide radically shifts the debate about borders and sovereignty. If sovereignty is indivisible, unitary and final, how can it be shared between states at their mutual perimeters? Is this really evidence of sovereignty waning? In this article, I suggest we are stuck at this conceptual impasse because of two conflations. The first one involves two aspects of sovereignty: authority and control. Looking at borders as thin jurisdictional lines, we observe only their legal authority (de jure); instead, by examining changing modes of control, we can see how new securitized borders actually reinforce state strength. The second conflation revolves around the conceptual linking of borders, states and sovereignty. This article argues that as borders thicken, they start to resemble frontiers, and sovereignty starts to resemble imperium – a Roman designation for political authority that is territorially unbounded. This disrupts the border/state dyad and situates borders (lines) and frontiers (zones) on a continuum. In doing so, it reveals how sovereignty is not waning, but changing shape – a worrisome geopolitical conclusion given the possibilities of neo-Imperialism due to power asymmetries between neighbouring states.     

Open borders

There is a large body of evidence indicating that cross-country differences in income levels are associated with differences in productivity. If workers are much more productive in one country than in another, restrictions on immigration lead to large efficiency losses. The paper quantifies these losses, using a model in which efficiency differences are labor-augmenting, and free trade in product markets leads to factor price equalization, so that wages are equal across countries when measured in efficiency units of labor. The estimated gains from removing immigration restrictions are huge. Using a simple static model of migration costs, the estimated net gains from open borders are about the same as the gains from a growth miracle that more than doubles the income level in less-developed countries.     

“We are Sitting on a Time Bomb”: A Multiperspectival Approach to Inter-National Development at an East African Border

Recent discussion in critical border studies has reaffirmed the validity and necessity of multiperspectival approaches which move beyond state-centric outlooks to include diverse viewpoints of people at or on borders. One understudied aspect of everyday border life involves how international development organisations fit within wider dynamics of cross-border activities. Drawing upon experiences of development projects at a key border crossing between Kenya and Uganda, I explore (1) how perceptions of risk and danger contribute to constructions of the border towns as places in need of development interventions, and (2) how this border also adds to practical and logistical concerns already held by development organisations as they deliver these interventions. I argue that the place-based mix of location, material forms, and perceptions or practices impacts how ‘inter-national development’ is rationalised in border regions.     

Does the version of the Penn World Tables matter? An analysis of the relationship between growth and volatility

Abstract .  The Penn World Tables (PWT) are an important data source for cross-country comparisons in economics. The PWT have undergone several revisions over time. This paper documents how countries' output growth rates change across four publicly available versions of the PWT. We show that for some countries the magnitude of the differences is significant and/or the sign of the growth rates changes across versions. Using as an example Ramey and Ramey (1995) , who found growth volatility has a significant negative effect on growth, we demonstrate that conclusions based on one version of the PWT may not hold under another version.     

Introduction to the Special Issue: Bordering the Middle East

ABSTRACT

Seven years after the beginning of the Syrian uprising and thirteen years after the transformation of Iraq into a federal state, one can notice the permanence of the nation state borders in the Middle East despite the worst prediction of a general breakdown of the colonial lines. But the Middle East, like no other region in the world, seems to face such a challenge to the state border system with the lasting internal fragmentations in Syria, Yemen, Libya and Iraq. In reaction to this threat, governments erected sophisticated and costly fences at the edge of the states, transforming the regional landscape, raising issues of states’ sovereignty and regimes’ legitimacy; they are also highlighting the existence of the local communities (religious, ethnic or tribal) that are largely straddling across the international borders, defining alternative boundaries of belonging. This special issue intends to deal with two main questions: how do borders influence actors’ identity building? And how do identity politics at the local or national level re/define borders and boundaries? Six case studies stemming from intensive fieldwork research provide insights on state-community relationships through the lens of border issues in the Machreq and the Gulf areas thanks to different disciplinary approaches. Through IS territorialisation, Jordanian Bedouins, Kuwait’s national identity representations, Israel’s Lebanese residents, Oman’s construction of political sovereignty and representations of Gulf and Middle Eastern borders, authors highlight multi-scalar processes of identity building and representations through the bordering of the national, tribal or religious group.     

Home and regional biases and border effects in Armington type models

We discuss biases in preferences and their trade effects in terms of impacts on non-neutral trade flows motivated by recent literature on both home bias and the border effect. These terms take on multiple definitions in the literature and are often used interchangeably even though they differ. The border effect refers to a higher proclivity to trade behind rather than across national borders and is usually defined by the coefficients of regional dummies from an estimated gravity model. It can be present both in data and in counterfactual model solutions. Sometimes the reduced form of the gravity model used is asserted to reflect an Armington type model. For the border effect to occur as a model outcome, a structural model with at least 2 home regions and 1 country abroad is needed. In contrast to current literature, we offer a characterization of various forms of preference bias in trade models and measures of their associated trade effects based on a concept we term trade neutrality. These effects go beyond conventional border effects, and can be both across and within borders. Home bias is typically specified as an Armington preference for domestic over comparable foreign products in a trade model where goods are heterogeneous across countries. It is reflected in both model structure and parameterization, but defined in several different ways in the literature. We assess the contribution of each form of bias to the set of possible trade effects using a calibrated model with 3 Canadian regions, the U.S., and the rest of the world using 2001 data. We also evaluate how much of the conventional border effect is accounted for when model biases are modified in various ways.     

BORDER EFFECTS WITHOUT BORDERS: WHAT DIVIDES JAPAN'S INTERNAL TRADE?

This article identifies a “border” effect in the absence of a border. The finding that trade between east and west Japan is 23.1% to 51.3% lower than trade within both country parts is established despite the absence of an obvious east–west division due to historical borders, cultural differences, or past civil wars. Postwar agglomeration processes, reflected by the contemporaneous structure of Japan's business and social networks, instead of cultural differences, induced by long‐lasting historical shocks, are identified as an explanation for the east–west bias in intra‐Japanese trade.     

The Trans-Political Nature of Southwest China’s Energy Conduit,Yunnan Province

Transboundary flows of energy across Yunnan Province in China and to Southeast Asian states provide insight into the changing nature of borders and border areas. Rather than monolithic symbols of state sovereignty, China’s southwest borders in Yunnan can be more accurately characterised as zones of connectivity and exchange, serving a range of local, national and regional objectives. Energy production and distribution in and across Yunnan can be understood as functioning in a set of dynamic transnational processes that serve as economic and political bridges – increasing interaction and deepening regional integration – while also working to mitigate risk to China’s energy demands. In this article, energy projects in Yunnan and Southeast Asia demonstrate the ways border regions can respond to increasing globalisation, simultaneously strengthening national energy security while promoting regional interconnection and diplomacy. Thus, connections to and through a once peripheral region present an apparent contradiction: once rigid territorial borders are increasingly characterised by transboundary infrastructure development and exchanges of energy, capital and diplomacy, while promoting broader, diversified national energy security objectives – essentially strengthening national security through transnational energy projects. This article investigates how energy development works to shape Yunnan’s role as an “energy conduit,” while advancing both transnational and national geopolitical objectives, and thus, suggesting that these projects can be understood as trans-political in nature.     

Modelling Cross-Border Integration: The Role of Borders as a Resource

Cross-border integration is a multifaceted as well as contextually contingent process. While various conceptualisations have been developed, the theoretical foundations of the concept appear insufficient in order to grasp the very significance of such a process of cross-border regionalism. In order to help make sense of the diversity of configurations observed, this article seeks to deconstruct the concept according to the role played by the border as a resource and to develop a theoretical framework based on two contrasted models of cross-border integration. The underlying hypothesis is that cross-border integration does not derive from the mere opening of national borders that it supposedly helps at the same time to remove, but stems from the strategic behaviour of actors who actively mobilise borders as resources. The first model, called ‘geo-economic’, is mainly based on the mobilisation of the border as a differential benefit and aims to generate value out of asymmetric cross-border interactions. In doing so, this process of functional integration is likely to increase cross-border socio-economic disparities and leads to cooperation oriented towards instrumental purposes such as increasing the economic utility of the border or regulating negative externalities. The second model, called ‘territorial project’, emphasises the border resources that involve a convergence of both sides of a border, either through a process of hybridisation/innovation or via the territorial and symbolic recognition borders entail. In this process of place-making that transcends the border, mutual understanding and trust between the actors is seen to be key and the willingness to cooperate essential. Conceived as ideal-types, the two models of cross-border integration are contrasted and to some extent contradictory. They are however not mutually exclusive and different kinds of combinations are examined based on concrete examples.     

Sloterdijk in the House! Dwelling in the Borderscape of Germany and The Netherlands

1. The order of the authors is alphabetical. It is almost a truism to say that people increasingly dwell in a transnational context, that is, in-between societal systems and together with multiple nationalities. Increasingly, people are living in a different nation in which they were born. The nation-states people dwell in cannot be equated with territorial container-boxes anymore, if this ever could. The uniform and straight lines in the sand, that borders once were thought to be, are now better understood as a complex choreography of border lines in multiplied lived spaces. This article zooms in on a specific kind of dwelling with multiple borders. It tries to get a conceptual hold of contemporary dwelling places of short-distance migrants across a EU inner border, in this case the Dutch-German border. In recent years, much facilitated by EU cross-border cohesion policies, a substantial number of Dutch people have bought or built a house just across the border in Germany. This has created an interesting new phenomenon of cross-border dwelling, in which the new location of the house is just across the border and the living largely still goes on in the country of origin. This living in two nations at the same time at such a short distance is what we wish to understand better conceptually in this article. We argue that two fundamentally opposed philosophical dwelling conceptualisations could be distinguished. On the one hand one could distinguish a philosophical view in which dwelling is a form of a Heideggerian nest, where people open a space of being, an intimate and secure bordered place, sheltering themselves for the outside world. On the other hand then, a philosophical view could be distinguished in which dwelling is driven by a Deleuzian need to free oneself from a binding b/order of home, through a constant be-coming and estrangement, hence by constantly othering oneself. We argue that in order to understand the borderscape dwellings of Dutch migrants in German borderlands, there is a need to relate these two ends of the dwelling continuum. The argument that we bring forward is that a borderline necessarily moves between total (self-)imprisonment and total escapist openness, making borders in an ontological sense intrinsicially and unavoidably always a shifting line in the sand. In our view, Peter Sloterdijk's imaginative Sphären (Spheres) trilogy could help as a conceptual stimulus to create that much needed bridge between the bordering efforts of nesting and the debordering desire to escape from it. Using Sloterdijk's spherical concepts, the dwelling can be seen as a place which is constantly changing from a secure bubble-like place into a multidimensional foam-like place and back again. With this spherical understanding of the house we argue that this conceptual ‘spheric’ stimulus could help to rethink the complex and ambivalent character of cross-border dwelling places in an increasingly transnational world.     

How does a cluster relocate across the border? The case of information technology cluster in the Taiwan-Suzhou region

Since the end of the Cold War, cross-border regions have proliferated at the borders of formal socialist countries, especially in China. Existing accounts of these emergences treat them either at the macro-level, focusing on political initiatives, or at the micro-level, with emphasis on social and economic relations. This paper uses the Taiwan-Suzhou cross-border region as a case study for suggesting a meso-level approach, arguing that as a result of continuous interactions between individual Taiwanese information technology firms and opportunity structures generated by the selective opening of the Chinese border, the formation of cross-border high-tech regions is shaped and determined at the level of the industrial system. The industrial system acts as a platform for coordination and cooperation between local elites and foreign investors and among individual firms within this system. The formation of the cross-border high-tech region thus involves the relocation and institutional re-embedding of industrial systems across the border, which has been accompanied by the systemic building of Taiwanese firms on the one hand, and the institutional innovation of Chinese local states on the other.