Hungary-Slovakia Cross-border Co-operation Programme 2007–2013 – regional aspects and implementation experience

Abstract

The present study deals with the cross-border cooperation and the reasons of its creation. It focuses on the achieved results and the regional aspects of the currently finishing projects of the Hungary–Slovakia Cross-border Co-operation Programme 2007–2013, supported from EU (ERDF) sources.

First, it presents those programmes which are supported by the EU and are directly connected to the Hungarian–Slovak border region. This includes the general description of the projects, their programmes and priorities. It is followed by the analysis of the project calls of the Hungary–Slovakia Cross-border Co-operation Programme 2007–2013, including their full description and comparison primarily on the level of the grant beneficiary partner organizations.

The main level of the regional analysis is the district (LAU 1). It should be recalled that, despite the far from perfect development of Slovakian districts, the information we can get from there about regional resource absorption differences is much better than what we get on the county (NUTS 3) or settlement (i.e. villages/towns) levels. While county level analysis does not recognize internal differences (which sometimes almost even exceed inter-country differences), the settlement (LAU 2) level is too fragmented for more broad generalizations. In addition, this study also deals with the county level and with resource absorption rates of dominant settlements and the biggest cities during the calls for project proposal.

Beside data processing and analysis, there is a need to investigate reasons behind regional differences, thus, the study also discusses this issue. The study concludes that from specific border regions (such as Kassa/Košice and its surrounding) project proposals were sent in an appropriate quantity and quality. Regions which sent only a few and below quality proposals (such as Rimaszombat/Rimavská Sobota district) were those which are the most neglected and require the most development. Besides, there are also large differences between regions in terms of their number of successfully implemented projects and activity rates within each priority axis. For instance, while in the southeast from Košice, a lot of new border crossing points has been established, none has been done at the lower and upper Ipoly/Ipeľ river regions. Therefore, we can raise some questions about the Cross-border Co-operation Programme’s exclusionary results: while there were many successful developments, in many near-border districts with high development needs only a few projects were completed. To ensure a more successful and balanced development in the future, communication between public actors and the right people living in the border areas need to be improved. This should be done in order to specify the socioeconomic development strategy and to improve the inhabitants’ life quality, which latter should not fall victim to personal political interests. Only in this way, the success of the next framework programme can be ensured.