Who Reaps The Benefits Of Permeable Borders? : Mental Maps, Networks And Language Skills In The Hungarian-Slovakian Border-Region

Morauszki, András and Letenyei, László (2020) Who Reaps The Benefits Of Permeable Borders? : Mental Maps, Networks And Language Skills In The Hungarian-Slovakian Border-Region. In: Mental Mapping. Schenk Verlag, Passau, pp. 71-92. ISBN 783944850788

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Abstract

Every year the European Union spends millions of euros to promote cross-border cooperation among its member states. The efficiency of these expenditures is measured with indicators, such as • the number of enterprises in the region increases • the number of jobs along the border increases • there is a given number of women among the project management staff All in all, we argue, that the indicators demanded by the EU are not suitable to measure how efficiently have the funds assigned to Cross-border Cooperation been spent. The present paper aims to present a direct measurement of the efficiency of Crossborder cooperation programs, based on • mental mapping (how do people see the other side of the borders, the towns and villages, services and opportunities) • language skills (how much do people speak the language of the neighboring country, how functional are these language skills) • and position generator (how much does their social network reach across the state border) This proposed research tool is suitable for both a cross-sectional analysis of a given geographical region (e.g. the two regions of Hungary and Slovakia that were examined in the pilot study), as well as a longitudinal analysis and measurement of the impact of Cross-border Cooperation programmes.

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