European integration, national border effects and the location of multinational enterprises in Poland: the case of new Voivodships

The aim of this article is to study the role of border effects in location decisions of multinational enterprises in Poland. The conditional and unconditional border effects are estimated for individual neighbouring countries using the regional NUTS II level dataset for the period of 1999-2003. The estimation results show that regions located close to the Eastern border are less attractive locations to multinational firms compared to their counterparts located in Central and Western parts of the country. These results suggest that special economic policy needs to be developed for these regions that would compensate for their disadvantaged location resulting from Poland’s increased integration with the European Union.