Thematic Platform "European Integration and Global Governance"

This project uses the rich historic experience of repeated large-scale and unexpected economic (dis-)integrations at the Austrian-Czech border to test the predictions of economic geography models of regional development. In particular we analyse the impact of these dis-integration events on regional development: first, in both Austria and the Czech Republic so that we focus on two countries which for a substantial part of the period analysed were characterised by rather different political regimes and huge differences in incomes and costs, that additionally changed over time; second, for a large set of (dis-)integration episodes that span a period of almost a century so that we compare different (dis-)integration events, that took place at different points in time at which the considered countries differed substantially in income levels and institutions; third, with respect to many potential adjustments (such as population and employment and unemployment growth as well as firm entry and exit) that will inform future research on the mechanisms through which the regional economic effects of integration operate.