Locational challenges and opportunities for SMEs in border regions

ABSTRACT

The present paper explores the unresolved issue in regional planning of whether small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) benefit from being located in border regions in terms of cross-border cooperation opportunities and cross-border externalities. By systematically reviewing the existing literature on the topic with the help of a mapping review, it suggests the following answer: SMEs in border regions do benefit from cross-border cooperation opportunities. However, there is no strong empirical support of a prevalence of positive cross-border externalities. Rather, the review finds that SMEs in border regions are influenced by negative cross-border externalities. Since the results do not point in a clear-cut direction, given their high degree of context-specificity, we claim that further studies on the topic are necessary to combine the established knowledge on SME-based entrepreneurship with planning theories and concepts taken from the literature on borders, border asymmetries and border regions.

KEYWORDS:

• Border region
• cross-border cooperation
• cross-border externalities
• entrepreneurs
• SMEs

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The most frequently used official definition, applied, e.g. within the EU, is that SMEs are businesses with less than 250 employees. However, some countries set the limit at 200 employees (e.g. Australia) or at 500 employees (e.g. USA). Moreover, researchers can of course utilize their own definitions that differ from the official ones. This naturally sets limits to the possibilities of direct cross-country comparisons (OECD, 2016): here, also, the results are presented in a general manner without making such far-reaching and definite comparisons.

2 Commonly defined as businesses with less than ten employees (Commission of the European Communities, 2003).

3 An entrepreneur is a person launching and running a (new and often small) business (Greve & Salaff, 2003).

4 The coverage in Scopus mostly starts with the publication year 1996. For the search criteria and strings applied in the present paper, no publication was identified prior to 2002 that matched the review filters.