Evaluation of the Effectiveness of Border Policies in Dehong Prefecture of Yunnan, China

With the process of globalization, many political geographers and research institutions have begun to focus on borders and border areas. Faced with the current debate on the border policies, this paper reviews the former research relating to border studies and provides an evaluation of China’s border policies. The literatures on border effects reveal that national boundaries have a significant impact on the economic, social and cultural relations of both border regions. Because of these effects, each country has to adjust its border policies in different periods. In this paper, a perspective is provided for evaluating the effectiveness of China’s border policy based on the Kaldor-Hicks analysis method. We investigated the border policies in Dehong Autonomous Prefecture in Yunnan province of China from 1949 to 2012, and evaluated the effectiveness of the border policy using the Kaldor-Hicks method. The conclusions include: first, the Kaldor-Hicks method can be seen as effective method to evaluate the effectiveness of China’s border policies. Second, based on the Kaldor-Hicks method, we observe the overall effects of the adjustments made to the border policies in Dehong Prefecture were positive. However, sometimes the border trade policy is good for the country as a whole, but not necessarily for Dehong Prefecture. For the sake of the whole country, adjustments in border trade policy need to be compensated by financial transfer payments. In addition, the combined effects of the cross-border marriages policy are not immediately obvious.