The EU includes 40 internal land borders, with neighbouring regions covering about one third of the EU’s population and GDP and serving as living labs of European integration. Despite progress, these regions remain economically weaker than their national average and obstacles persist in accessing high quality, reliable statistics.
The new Data hub for EU border regions collects harmonised geo-spatial data on cross-border interactions and robust socio-economic indicators, empowering policymakers with critical insights to draw on the untapped potential of these territories.
Over the last decades, EU initiatives such as the Single Market, the border-free Schengen area, the adoption of a common currency and coordination in areas including education, healthcare and transport have significantly overcome the challenges posed by national borders on surrounding areas.
However, these borders still limit full socio-economic integration between neighbouring regions, posing legal, administrative, infrastructure and linguistic challenges.
Providing public information on existing cross-border interactions is crucial to enhance institutional cooperation between neighbouring regions and to ensure better public services. Through a user-friendly platform and interactive data visualisations, the novel Data hub offers a wealth of statistics and analyses covering a variety of domains. These include public transport (including missing rail links), public services, healthcare and related cooperation, cross-border governance, crisis management, energy communities, and other border obstacles and solutions, ultimately facilitating effective policies across EU borders.
The Data hub builds upon an inventory of datasets collected by European Commission's Directorate-General for Regional and Urban Policy (DG REGIO) since 2017. These data have been combined with robust, consistent socio-economic indicators and variables facilitated by the Joint Research Centre (JRC), thus providing harmonised, comparable data, useful to support evidence-based policies.
Policy context
In 2017, the Commission put forward a Communication to the Council and the European Parliament on Boosting growth and cohesion in EU border regions, proposing 10 concrete actions to address many of the challenges facing EU border regions, related to legal, administrative, infrastructure, linguistic and socio-economic matters.
One of the actions proposed is to build evidence of cross-border interactions to inform decision-making, specifically by improving statistical and geospatial data describing cross-border phenomena.
The Data hub for EU border regions addresses this need by making geospatial data and analyses on cross-border interaction publicly accessible. It is a joint initiative of the Directorate-General for Regional and Urban Policy and the JRC.
The Data hub is a key component of the Border Focal Point, which works to remove legal, technical, and administrative obstacles to integration and to support cross-border cooperation. The Data hub contributes to this goal by providing data to support the development of more effective policies for intra-EU border regions.
Related links
- Publication date
- 12 December 2024
- Author
- Joint Research Centre
- JRC portfolios 2025-27
