Vas County
Up to 20,000 residents of Vas County cross into Austria every working day. They earn roughly three times what equivalent jobs pay on the Hungarian side of the border, then return home to a cost of living a third of Austria's. This daily arbitrage — enabled by EU free movement since Hungary's 2004 accession — has compressed Vas County's unemployment to among the lowest rates in Hungary, without the county having created most of those jobs itself. The economy functions as cross-border mutualism: Vas supplies labour that Burgenland cannot source domestically; Burgenland supplies wages that Vas cannot generate locally. Remove either side and the other destabilises.
The border was not always permeable. Until 1989, Vas County sat behind the Iron Curtain, its western edge sealed by fences and watchtowers. When Hungary dismantled the frontier — a process catalysed by the Pan-European Picnic further north near Sopron in August 1989, where hundreds of East Germans rushed through a briefly opened gate — Vas County's geography flipped from liability to asset overnight. A phase transition in the literal sense: the same physical border shifted from barrier to membrane, and the county's economic structure reorganised around the new permeability.
That geographic position has been the county's defining feature for two millennia. Szombathely, the county seat, was founded as the Roman colony of Savaria around 43 AD on the Amber Road linking the Baltic to the Adriatic — Hungary's oldest continuously inhabited city. The same corridor logic persists: Vas County sits on the transport axis connecting Vienna to Budapest, and multinational manufacturers — Schaeffler, Linde, Kromberg and Schubert — have clustered along it. In Szentgotthárd, a plant inherited from Opel and now operated by Stellantis produces engines and electric drive modules. Two thousand years of path-dependence: the infrastructure changes, but the corridor endures.
The structural risk is symmetrical with the advantage. If Austria restricted cross-border commuting, Vas County's effective employment base would contract sharply — and the system has no fallback, because the local economy never needed to generate those jobs itself. The county's population has declined from 257,000 to 250,000 over the past decade, as young workers choose Budapest or Vienna over returning. Vas County is a source-sink economy in its purest form: exporting labour to a higher-wage ecosystem and importing the wages that keep it solvent. The arrangement works until the border thickens again.