Lights along the frontier: convergence of economic activity in the proximity of the Polish-German border, 1992–2012

ABSTRACT

This paper studies regional economic development on the municipality-level in Poland and Germany along the Oder–Neisse border. We use high-quality satellite night-time light intensity data as an innovative and comparable measure to proxy for overall economic activity on both sides of the border consistently over a long period of time (1992–2012). We use descriptive heat maps as well as regression analysis to investigate two aspects: first, how far is the economic convergence along the Polish-German border? Second, what effect does the distance to the border have on economic activity as measured with light emissions? Our findings suggest that convergence in overall activity across the border has been complete. Polish municipalities that used to be economically much weaker have caught up with those on the German side of the Oder and the Neisse rivers. As regards the importance of distance, we highlight different results for Germany and Poland. While distance to the border never mattered significantly for German regions, Polish municipalities closer to the border used to be substantially worse off in the early 1990s but caught up with regions further to the east by the end of the period of our analysis.

KEYWORDS:

• Regional development
• regional convergence
• post-communist transition
• borders
• night lights

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• O18
• P25
• R12

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the National Science Centre Poland under grant number: 2016/21/B/HS4/01574. The authors wish to thank Matthias Barelkowski for illuminating discussions about the economic and political history of the Oder–Neisse region and Kajetan Trzciński for documentation of the border bridge infrastructure. We are also grateful to participants of the Jean Monnet Symposium at Gdańsk University of Technology (June 2019), the Development Day Conference at the Stockholm Institute of Transition Economics (December 2019) and the BICEPS/SSE-Riga Research Seminar (January 2020) as well as to three anonymous referees for their comments and suggestions. The usual disclaimer applies.

Disclosure statement

The authors have no competing interests to disclose.

Data availability statement

This paper uses night-time lights data for years 1992-2012 in the DMSP-OLS format and openly available at: https://eogdata.mines.edu/dmsp/downloadV4composites.html. The final analysis data set together with necessary STATA code which performs the analysis reported in the article is available at the Zenodo repository under DOI number: 10.5281/zenodo.4600685.

Notes

¹ This approach has since been used to analyse regional development in numerous other studies and the data have been validated against traditional measures of economic performance (e.g.: Zhao, Currit, and Samson 2011; Michalopoulos and Papaioannou 2013; von Ehrlich and Seidel, 2014; Huang et al. 2014; this data has also been used earlier in other disciplines, e.g.: Elvidge et al. 2009a; Ghosh et al. 2009).

² We only include municipalities below the last border bridge on the Oder/Neisse river (53.339 N, 14.499E).

³ Map data copyrighted OpenStreetMap contributors and available from https://www.openstreetmap.org

⁴ We used osm2po http://osm2po.de/to import OSM routing into PostGIS (for details see osm2po documentation).

⁵ One area in Germany where the reduction of light is noticeable is the community of Neißemünde located at the border just north of Guben. Light emissions in the community are high between 1992 and 1997 which suggests a link to changes in infrastructure after the 1997 flooding which significantly affected this area.

⁶ Unfortunately, we have only been able to measure time in recent data (July 2018) which may not reflect the actual travel times in the past due to significant changes in road infrastructure. We therefore treat the analysis using travel time with additional caution.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Narodowe Centrum Nauki [2016/21/B/HS4/01574].