Economy and Border Regions – A Research Gap? Results from a Scoping Review
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Borders are a prominent element in economies: international interactions cross at least one border, marking differences in regulation. Classical economics sees borders mainly in terms of transaction costs, which can be decreased through trade liberalization, as illustrated by free trade agreements and the European integration process. More critical approaches reflect on who profits from border regimes and liberalization, and who does not. At the local level, however, knowledge on economic functioning seems to be rather limited, with prominent debates on cohesion, border-related barriers, and resources often being vaguely linked to economic dynamics. Based on a scoping review, this paper aims to enhance this understanding through a systematic overview of the academic discourse on the border-economy-nexus. Our aim is to reveal geographic and sectoral foci as well as conceptual strands in the academic discourse. The results reveal a strong focus on the US–Mexico border and European borders. Topics such as trade, the informal economy and agriculture are primarily addressed. While most existing research considers differentials, barriers and resources, it rarely refers to the border region on a small scale. Based on such arguments, we formulate proposals for a research agenda that more systematically address dynamics within border-regional economies.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".