Abstract
The paper focuses on the importance of borders in the context of socio-economic inequality and its spatial aspects on the example of Czechia and Slovakia. Various types of borders (national, regional, historical, cultural) are taken into account.
Studying importance of historical or functional borders has not yet been comprehensively studied even though it has direct political implications. From the international perspective, it is interesting to assess importance of national borders.
Schengen zone and EU regional policy should have significant impacts on border regions and their socio-economic inequality. Moreover, the national borders are often said to be dissolving.
Within the paper, we ask several questions: Are national boundaries important barriers or rather bridges? Is the regional development and specifically socio-economic inequality influenced by borders? How is this phenomenon evolving in time? The questions are answered through extensive empirical analysis in Czechia and Slovakia. To measure spatial aspects of differentiation and assessing border effects we use methods such as Theil index decomposition and spatial autocorrelation.
We combine these two different approaches and show how its joint utilization can bring new insights to studying regional/spatial inequality, building on previous methodological research. Moreover, thanks to methods of local spatial analysis (local indicators of spatial association - LISA), we are able to uncover local specifics.
Due to utilized methods, data must be on a spatially very detailed level, at least on a municipal one. Micro-regional research of this type is not very common, especially when studying several countries at the same time.
For quantification of socio-economic inequality, secondary data accessible from public sources (censes in this case) such as unemployment rate, age preference index, and education are used. The period between 2001 and 2011 is studied.