Cooperating Neighbourhood10 April 2008
There are plenty of ideas and intentions for cooperation with neighbouring countries for the joint development of cross-border regions; the European Union intends to invest a significant amount of funding for this purpose over the course of the upcoming years – said the State Secretary for national policy of the PMO Mr Ferenc Gémesi at a press conference held on 9 April.
Information on the sources of funding that can be spent on this and the cooperation frameworks has already been made available; the first set of joint concepts have already been elaborated in the case of the Hungarian-Romanian and Hungarian-Slovak cooperation initiatives. As regards the Hungarian-Romanian region, a total of 222 million Euros may be made available here over the course of the upcoming period.
According to experiences, the governments of the neighbouring countries have also expressed their serious intent to launch joint developments in these regions. The structured database just being launched presenting the economic, demographic, cultural and educational characteristics of 7300 settlements of the Carpathian Basin with Hungarian residents also helps locate development funding and mainly provides help for Hungarian experts and the experts of neighbouring countries in the information gathering and decision-preparation process. As mentioned by the state secretary, the data registered by the statistical offices of the concerned countries was used as a basis for creating the continually expanding website.
With the help of the new system, it will be possible to search for data in connection with the number of Hungarians living in a given region, breakdown by age-bracket, the rate of unemployment, main Hungarian institutions operating in the area, as well as other information in connection with education, training and employment. One of the greatest novelties of the system is that information searched for in connection with the regions will also be presented on a map by using the Google Earth satellite map of the world.
It will be easy to pinpoint incorrect action taken within the scope of development policy with the help of the Regional Spatial IT Planning System, and at the same time the system considerably facilitates, for example, joint tendering by Hungarian counties and counties of neighbouring countries in their immediate vicinity. To access the database log on www.regions.hu.