The Impact of The Polish-Ukrainian Borderland on The Local Community Well-Being

Abstract

This article discusses selected results of a comparative study aimed at understanding the relationship between the location – in particular, within the borderland, understood as an area within a radius of 50 km from the Polish-Ukrainian border, on both sides – and the development of the community, on one side, and its impact on well-being of the areas’ inhabitants, households and individuals, on the other. As emphasized in the general hypothesis underlying this study, the importance of locating in such areas (both for communities and individuals) results from transborder economic activity, which was quite intensive before the February 2022. The question about the role of ʽplaceʼ and ʽspaceʼ for quality of life and well-being – including possible concentration of territorial units (gminas, rayons) of similar levels of development, or ‘neighbourhood effect’ (or clustering) among individuals/households – needs to be extended by analysis of the cross-level interaction between the community’s and individual’s respective measures of development and well-being. For this purpose, data from the two types of sources are used: (i) Local Data Bank (Poland) and Rayon Database (Ukraine) to characterize the level of (under)development and local deprivation, and (ii) data from survey of households conducted in parallel way in selected communes in Podkarpacie and Lviv. In the conclusions, confirmed is expectation that border residential neighbourhood/borderland has significant impact on individual and community respective measures, and on interaction between them (e.g., on average higher well-being in less deprived/better developed communities). However, some caution should be exercised when drawing conclusions for policy purposes, given the narrow scope of this type of (non-representative) research. But the methodological advantage of the above approach due to the inclusion of spatial aspects argues for the need for its further exploration, in a comparative perspective.