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Cross-border
economic
development 10 Preamble
The “presential” economy
This view leads to a different way of envisaging public action with
respect to the economic development of a territory, which is no
longer focused solely on developing existing firms and attracting
new ones. An economic analysis of a territory must take into
account the links between the different spaces that people operate
in (home, production, consumption and leisure), connected by an
efficient transport system, and incorporate the potential constituted
by capturing the wealth available within the population present in
the territory: the development of service activities (retail and leisure,
and business and leisure tourism). The aim is then to develop a
welcoming strategy with regard to new residents, commuters and
tourists that helps to develop service activities6 for the population,
thereby creating jobs that, by definition, cannot be relocated.
Each territory has a specific balance between productive and
presential economies that results from its particular geography
and history (productive and social capital, accessibility, amenities,
etc.). Some territories can “get along well” without a productive
economy. Of course, the viability of a territory’s economy depends
on exchanges with the world outside: in an open economy, the
goods and services produced need to find external markets; and
the flows that support the presential economy need to be fuelled by
revenue produced elsewhere (work of commuters and tourists, social
security benefits of the unemployed and pensioners, and the funding
of public services).
The territories based more or less on a productive or presential
economy support one another, with this solidarity being the result
both of the market itself and of public policies that redistribute
revenue between territories, whether explicitly (territorial
development) or implicitly (network of public services and social
security provision).
The regulation of this redistribution is primarily carried out by
national governments; it is currently the subject of intense debate
and far-reaching reforms in France and the neighbouring countries.
This not only raises the issue of social cohesion (level of social
security contributions and taxes, the trade-off between efficiency
and equality) but also that of territorial cohesion (the optimum
administrative level for public action, territorial equality, an approach
based on population or territory depending on the extent to which
residential mobility is encouraged).
In a context in which governments’ ability to ensure cohesion is
being curtailed by the crisis in public financing, L. Davezies recently
proposed the idea of “dual production-based and residential
systems”,7 large territories that combine the two spheres, giving
them greater viability. It is the fact that some of these systems
are cross-border in character, whereas, so far, regulations remain
national, that makes cross-border territories laboratories for
European territorial cohesion.
6 /sphere.htm
7 L. DAVEZIES and M. TALANDIER, L’Emergence de systèmes productivo-résidentiels.
Territoires productifs – Territoires résidentiels: quelles interactions ?, CGET (General
Commission for Territorial Equality), La Documentation française, 2014.
Presential and
non-presential spheres:
the particular case of cross-
border territories
As in any territory, the two aspects (productive and presential) are present
in a border or cross-border territory. But sometimes the border serves
to separate a more “productive” area, with industries producing goods
and services that are not necessarily intended for the territory, from a
more “presential” area, in which the retail sector, tourism and services
to the population are more developed. Some French border territories
are emblematic in this regard due to the intensity of the home-work
flows of people crossing the border (to Luxembourg and the Basel and
Geneva conurbations from the surrounding territories).
The dichotomy between a predominantly productive territory and a
predominantly presential territory would, within a single State, be the
subject of various public means of regulation (spatial planning aimed at
rebalancing flows, financial solidarity, reorganisation of local government,
etc.), but such public policies are highly problematic in this case owing
to the fact that a national border divides the predominantly presential
territory from the predominantly productive territory.
A cross-border analysis is therefore important for this type of area,
particularly regarding the distribution of living spaces and of the provision
of services. This dimension of territorial planning is not always shared
in cross-border settings: this is where there is sometimes a divergence
in the role of public intervention to promote economic development.
Even if not all borders display such a polarisation, the movement of
people, goods, services and capital, and as a result, the integration of
territories, no longer takes place just within each country, but within
the European area as a whole (the European Union and third countries
such as Switzerland). The hypothesis of this research is that this mobility
plays or can play a more significant role in the context of cross-border
regions, where it is a potential source of prosperity, if it is regulated in
a coordinated manner by the countries on either side of the border.
100 km
VAUD
Jura
Ain
FRANCE
Number of cross-borderworkers
70 649
27 086
4 449
492
7431
4463
Geneva
Haute-Savoie
Source : INSEE2012,BFS2015
SWITZERLAND
Home-work commuting - Greater Geneva
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