Hardi Tamás - Tóth Károly (szerk.): Határaink mentén. A szlovák-magyar határtérség társadalmi-gazdasági vizsgálata (2008) (Somorja, 2009)
Esettanulmányok
226 Summary close to the border, from Bratislava right to Košice. They offer tailor-made solutions for all requests, from business foundation to car rent; in fact, they even go into a price competition to win the Hungarian customers in some cases. This is a process definitely concerning the border region, as the majority of the Hungarian companies locating to Slovakia choose their locations in the stripe within 20 to 30 kilometres from the state border. The chambers of commerce have definitely good connections with several institutions. The most important cooperating partners are the chambers of commerce in Slovakia (e.g. in Bratislava or Nitra). These relations are very versatile, ranging from the professional forums of general character through targeted partner mediation of businesses to the implementation of joint projects. In addition to the chamber of commerce of course they have other institutions and organisations as partners, including business development foundations, vocational training institutions, the Bratislava Office of the ITDH (Hungarian Investment and Trade Development Agency), the Hungarian-Slovak Section of ITDH, or the Hungarian Embassy of the Republic in Slovakia in Hungary. Cross-border commuting and the local labour market The phenomenon of cross-border commuting is interesting because in legal sense it is an international migration, but mostly within local circumstances. This phenomenon is different from the traditional employment “abroad”, as the employees live their lives in the neighbour country and have their place of work in the other state. This situation differentiates this circle of employees from other foreign citizens, as their situation is special, raising a number of issues from the organisation of daily traffic through the use of public services to taxation and the conversion of the incomes. According to our survey, approximately 10% of the inhabitants living in the Slovak border region have either worked already or is presently working, maybe planning to work in the future in Hungary. If we also take their families into consideration, cross-border employment involves a much bigger part of the population. We can see a phenomenon thus that is known within the space of a single nation state; in this case, however, obeying the rules of the market and utilising the possibilities given (permeability of the borders, institutional integration, better access to the neighbouring border region in the broader sense of the word), some local labour market districts have already penetrated into the neighbour state and are shaping their relationships on the other side of the border too. Since the turn of the millennium, one of the most dynamically developing cross-border movements has been commuting to work. Mutual employment in the neighbour state has traditionally existed in the region. Due to the axes of industrial development and the lack of language and cultural barriers, mutual employment in the neighbour country existed already in the socialist period, but it temporarily ceased to exist after the systemic change, because of the economic decline of those years. After a few years of stagnation, since 1999 the number of employees commuting from Slovakia to Hungary has been steadily growing. In the western part of the border region unemployment rates are higher in Slovakia than in Hungary, whereas in Hungary there are significant industrial centres in the vicinity of the border that have already exhausted their local pool of labour force. Regular commuting, on the other hand, is set back by the low number of bridges. Significant indicators of the contacts of Mosonmagyaróvár, Győr and Komárom were their Danube bridges (and the same role is played by the reconstructed Mária Valéria Bridge in Esztergom and its environment). Ferry as a means of transport is rather uncertain, dependant to a large extent on weather
