Focus on Eastern Integration: Cross-Border Trade in Services Rendered with the New EU Member Countries

The study offers an in-depth overview of the internationalisation activities pursued by services with limited market range located in the Austrian border regions to the new EU member countries based on a business survey carried out in cooperation with Statistics Austria. The services companies in the border region tend to have the same inclination to go international (13 percent) as was found by comparable studies. Nevertheless, there are considerable variations by sectors and company size. Most of the services are rendered through the temporary posting of staff, although subsidiaries and cooperative ventures play an important role, too. More than half of the businesses operating internationally render services also in the new EU countries, although the full potential offered by the dynamic CEE economies as a sales and procurement market has not yet been fully realised by all businesses.