BROCHURE_DEV_ECO

Cross-border

economic

development

Territory portraits: economic development on different borders

Sectors of economic cooperation

The common activities linked to the automotive industry and more

generally to the Greater Region’s industrial past have generated several

interregional cooperation projects, with support from the INTERREG

programme.

The IntermatGR project

(2013-2014) aims at creating a cross-

border cluster in the materials and processes sector, and plans in a

first stage to map each region’s skills and to identify potential areas

of cooperation in order to foster technology transfer. However,

such a project requires overcoming a recurrent difficulty in the

Greater Region – that of the asymmetry of competences. The

cluster policy is thus shared between national government, the

regions and municipalities in France and Germany, while it is

overseen by the Wallonia Region and the Luxembourg Government.

The issue of access to financing and support for business innovation

at the interregional level are also the subject of growing coordination

in the Greater Region.

Led by the Luxembourg Chamber of Commerce and Luxinnovation,

the National Agency for Innovation and Research, the

project

Seed4Start

(2011-2015) puts in touch businesses that are

seeking venture capital and investors, while the innovation

pathways 1,2,3 GO (created in 2000) support young entrepreneurs

in the drawing-up and implementation of business plans.

In spite of the “Luxembourg-centrism” of these initiatives, which are

aimed primarily at facilitating the access of businesses to the Luxembourg

market, we can highlight the prior existence, since the end of the 1990s,

of a trinational (FR-BE-LUX) venture capital fund, EUREFI, designed to

provide financial support and fiscal engineering to businesses wishing

to set up in the territory of the European Development Pole (EDP) and/

or extend their activity to the cross-border area.

For more information, see the Project Factsheet.

Labour market

Unemployment rates vary greatly across the Greater Region. While

Luxembourg, Rhineland-Palatinate and Saarland posted a relatively

low annual rate in 2012 (5.1%, 4% and 6.4% respectively), the situation

is much more worrying in Lorraine (12.2%) and Wallonia (10%),

with

these two regions being the worst affected in France and Belgium.

Cross-border employment, primarily in Luxembourg, is therefore a

lifeline for the populations of Lorraine and Wallonia. In 2012, the Grand

Duchy received nearly 143,000 cross-border workers, a number which,

in spite of a temporary slowdown due to the economic crisis, is steadily

increasing. Financial and business services, the retail sector, the medical

sector and industry, principally, employ around 76,000 people from

Lorraine, 32,000 from Wallonia, 27,000 from Rhineland-Palatinate

and 8,000 from Saarland.

Cross-border workers also commute from

Lorraine to Saarland. The Greater Region is thus one of the European

regions where labour mobility is the highest.

With respect to education, the

University of the Greater Region

which has been co-financed by the INTERREG IV Greater Region

programme, brings together the universities in the interregional

territory and enables young people to follow cross-border courses.

However, command of German is in decline in Lorraine and

understanding Luxembourgish has become a precious asset with

the growth of support services to individuals in the Grand Duchy.

Following the signature of the framework agreement on cross-

border apprenticeships in the Upper Rhine, the Greater Region

stakeholders have also committed to ensuring greater mobility for

apprentices, with the signature on 20 June 2014 of an agreement

between Saarland and Lorraine, which is due to be progressively

extended to include the other greater-regional entities.

Source: Eurostat, 2012.

Source:

Statistiques en bref 2013

, published by the Greater Region’s statistical offices,

January 2013.