While diverse administrative, economic and political events throughout history have had an influence on the movement of people around the world, none of them had a bigger impact on the number of people crossing the European Union’s (EU) eastern border than the current COVID-19 pandemic. But how has this actually fared on tourism, the labour market and student flows?

A case study part of ESPON’s IRiE project has shown the effects that the pandemic has had on the interregional flow of people across the Polish eastern border by studying population flows between 1994-2020. This time period has not only seen Poland’s accession into the EU and the Schengen Area, but it was also here that several formal and legal conditions that had an impact on cross-border population flows were introduced. Examples of such conditions include the introduction of visas for citizens of Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine (in order to enter Poland) in 2003 and the establishment of a visa-free regime between the Schengen Area member states and Ukraine in mid-2017, amongst others.

However, it should be highlighted that the volume of cross-border traffic is also influenced by developments and decisions in countries neighbouring Poland, such as the annexation of Crimea in 2013. Meanwhile, none of the previous events that had an influence on the volume of cross-border traffic across Poland’s eastern border has had a greater impact than the restrictions put into place to combat the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the study. Collected data shows that the Polish-Ukrainian border traffic has been recorded at only one-third of the pre-pandemic cross-border traffic numbers. A slightly lower, yet still significant, decrease has been seen on the Polish-Belarusian border where only one-fourth of the pre-pandemic border traffic numbers have been observed.

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