Abstract

Over the past few decades, globalization has been shifting economic power upward to transnational actors on the one hand, and downward to subnational or regional spaces on the other. This phenomenon has resulted in the centrality of territorially delimited subnational regions acting as critical loci of economic governance within a complex and globally distributed value chain of trade and service flows. Within this broader context of industrial restructuring are economic regions that span national borders in their collective assets. The paper focuses on investigating the economic competitiveness and productivity of cross-border (or binational) economic regions. Using the conceptual framework of economic clusters, an econometric model that measures proxies of geographic proximity of firms in the life sciences cluster, and a new binational economic model, the paper examines the key characteristics, potentials and constraints of economic competitiveness and productivity in a cross-border region comprising counties in Western New York and regional municipalities in Southern Ontario. The findings demonstrate the direct and indirect benefits of closer cross-border economic cooperation. The paper then concludes with some policy observations about leveraging cross-border economic clusters for strategic industrial cooperation.