The aim of this package of four closely inter-related research projects is to find ways of understanding and increasing the accessibility, size, transparency, competitiveness and profitability of Irish border region markets in a context where peace and normality have finally arrived in Northern Ireland and the Southern Border Region, but have been followed by a deep economic recession. This overall project – in which the Centre is partnered by InterTradeIreland – is being carried out by a high-level team led by Dr John Bradley, formerly a research professor at the Economic and Research Institute in Dublin; Professor Michael Best of the Universities of Massachusetts and Cambridge, an international authority on regional business strategies; and two economists from the Wroclaw Regional Development Agency in Poland (the research is ‘twinned’ for comparative purposes with the Lower Silesia region of Poland and its common border with the German länder of Saxony and Brandenburg). This project was formally launched in April 2010. An ‘emerging findings’ conference will be held in November 2011.
The four constituent elements of this research project are:
- The ‘generic’ challenges the region faces due to its peripheral location. This ‘framing’ study, which was presented at the first Steering Group meeting in April 2010, provides a stand-alone interpretive framework for understanding how a border region becomes peripheral, and how peripherality creates challenges to development. It also provides inputs in terms of data sources (or lack of them) and specific applications to help understand the other three elements of the study. See Topic 1: Peripherality: Help or Hindrance?
- How border region consumer markets might be made more efficient drivers of regional growth. This second study, which is currently being undertaken, is focusing on the border region viewed as an area where consumer behaviour has been, and continues to be, both isolated and distorted, and which must now seek ways of becoming a genuine single market. Cross-border shopping is the most dramatic aspect of this consumer behaviour, but the study is more interested in the disruption that the border causes to the evolution of local consumer market linkages on both sides of the border.
- How the region’s small and micro-enterprises, which are the mainstay of so much economic activity in the region, might be enabled to develop. The third study, which is being undertaken in tandem with the second topic, examines how small and micro-enterprises, which are predominant particularly in the more rural central border region, can draw inspiration and support from the region’s special characteristics of a pristine environment and lack of congestion. This study involves factory visits and detailed interviews with owners and managers.
- How the region’s tourism product might dovetail with strategic plans for tourism in Ireland. This final study will explore tourism in terms of peripherality, consumer markets, micro-enterprise behaviour and tourism-related infrastructure, thus bringing together, in the form of an integrated case study, the insights which have emerged from the first three topics.
The Steering Group for this project brings together economists, industrial promotion practitioners and cross-border cooperation specialists from InterTradeIreland, the Department of Enterprise,Trade and Investment (NI), Invest Northern Ireland, Forfás (RoI), the Economic and Social Research Institute (RoI), the Centre for Cross Border Studies and University of Ulster.
