This article analyses the process of spatial integration in ten European cross-border metropolitan regions by comparing three indicators, relating to flows of cross-border commuters, differentials of gross domestic product per capita and residents' citizenship. Our results allow, firstly, confirmation of the hypothesis that the greater the economic disparities, the greater the level of interactions measured by cross-border commuting. Our work also allows confirmation of the hypothesis that strong economic interactions have an impact on the cross-border integration of communities, measured by the proportion of residents based on the other side of the border. Finally, this article leads to a typology based on three models of cross-border integration being proposed: by specialization, by polarization and by osmosis.

Introduction The concentration of economic activity in metropolitan regions is without doubt one of the most striking aspects of contemporary economic geography (Barnes and Ledebur, 1991; Kra« tke, 2007). This process of metropolisation goes hand in hand with a redefinition of the traditional prerogatives of states in relation to urban centres and with a regeneration of cities as territorial (Brenner, 2004; Le Gale© s and Harding, 1998) and international actors (Ku« bler and Piliutyte, 2007). In this way the state has passed from the role of a top-down resource-allocating and regulatory authority to that of a partner and mediator (Kohler-Koch, 1996). As Jessop (2004) argues, this reconfiguration of the role of the state is organised based on two privileged directions. By transferring part of their sovereignty to a supranational authority, the member states of the European Union (EU) have contributed to the construction of an economic system of regulation and to the removal of obstacles that may have impeded exchanges between them (Scharpf, 1999). At the same time the reforms of government functions carried out since the 1980söincluding a transfer of authority and resources to local governments, deregulations, and privatisations (Rodr|¨guez-Pose and Sandall, 2008) öhave given new room for manoeuver to a large number of actors such as public agencies, local and regional authorities, firms, and nongovernmental organisations (NGOs). These different processes have participated in the emergence of multilevel governance within the framework of the EU (Hooghe, 1996). In this context many studies relating to metropolitan governance have shown the difficulty of building institutional territories of cooperation. One of the reasons is that the types of cooperation, when they exist, often take place within narrow parameters

This paper provides evidence of how national borders affect the structure of policy networks. Our analysis of the Basel cross-border metropolitan region located across Switzerland, France and Germany considers the case of public transportation in border regions. Using a social network analysis of the relationships between 44 actors, we show that national borders play a diminishing role in the formation of policy networks for both information exchange and decision making. Local actors develop different brokerage roles according to their country of origin: Swiss actors function as coordinator and representative brokers vis-à-vis actors located in France and Germany.

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To date, most of the literature on trade networks in West Africa has considered networks in a metaphorical way. The aim of this paper is to go one step further by showing how social network analysis may be applied to the study of regional trade in West Africa. After a brief review of the literature, this exploratory paper investigates two main issues related to regional trade. We start by discussing how recent developments in regional trade in West Africa have contributed to challenging the social structure of traders. We then discuss the changes that have affected the spatiality of regional trade by looking at the influence of spatial location and geographic scale on traders' abilities to trade. In both cases, we argue that the value of social network analysis in exploring how traders have progressively adapted to social and spatial changes in economic activities has been greatly underestimated. Our discussion is illustrated with the case of two trade networks located between Niger, Benin and Nigeria.

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In West Africa, long and complex livestock value chains connect producers mostly in the Sahel with consumption basins in urban areas and the coast. Regional livestock trade is highly informal and, despite recent efforts to understand animal movement patterns in the region, remains largely unrecorded. Using CILSS' database on intraregional livestock trade, we built yearly and overall weighted networks of animal movements between markets. We mapped and characterized the trade networks, identified market communities, key markets and their roles. Additionally, we compared the observed network properties with null-model generated ensembles. Most movements corresponded to cattle, were made by vehicle, and originated in Burkina Faso. We found that live animals in the central and eastern trade basins flow through well-defined, long distance trade corridors where markets tend to trade in a disassortive way with others in their proximity. Modularity-based communities indicated that both national and cross-border trade groups exist. The network's degree and link distributions followed a log-normal or a power-law distribution, and key markets located primarily in urban centers and near borders serve as hubs that give peripheral markets access to the regional network. The null model ensembles could not reproduce the observed higher-level properties, particularly the propinquity and highly negative assortativity, suggesting that other possibly spatial factors shape the structure of regional live animal trade. Our findings support eliminating cross-border impediments and improving the condition of the regional road network, which limit intraregional trade of and contribute to the high prices of food products in West Africa. Although with limitations, our study sheds light on the abstruse structure of regional livestock trade, and the role of trade communities and markets in West Africa.

The Department of Border Region Studies Working Papers are circulated to encourage the exchange of ideas about borders, regional economics, and global business. The findings and conclusions expressed in these papers are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the Department of Border Region Studies or the University of Southern Denmark. The working papers have not been peer-reviewed.