EU labor policy recommendations drawn from COVID-driven research attention on cross-border commuting - A review
Abstract
This paper aims to investigate which EU cross-border labor policy recommendations can be drawn from COVID-driven research attention. For this purpose, a systematic literature review with an in-depth qualitative analysis of selected articles was performed.
Overall, three major categories of recommendations were revealed. Besides recommendations on contagion policy and the centrality of decision-making, recommendations on solving the social impact of the pandemic on the reputation of cross-border commuters can be deduced.
The three categories are unified by the need for more regional but cross-border approaches in decision-making and research in general. Seeing the EU rather more as a constellation of various economic and social regions, including cross-border communities, than a total of countries divided by national borders, would benefit EU labor policy and cross-border commuters automatically - not only in times of crises.
Exploiting new spatial research methods to analyze (labor) mobility within border regions enables novel contributions to the state of research.