ABSTRACT
In the European Union, national borders are losing importance. In many parts of the world, the process of urbanisation is accelerating. With economic development comes an increasing mobility of populations. All these and many other processes affect the living conditions of linguistic and other minorities. As a consequence, the basis for traditional minority policies might change. In this chapter, in the spirit of economic cost-benefit or cost-effectiveness analysis, we examine the effects of these changing conditions on the costs of traditional policy measures. In any economic analysis, costs play an important role. The question is, how are costs affected by urbanisation? Taking as our point of reference two minorities in Europe, the Hungarian speakers in Transylvania and the Swedish speakers in the area around the capital, Helsinki/Helsingfors, in southern Finland, we first discuss the implications of urbanisation in light of a cost-effectiveness analysis. This provides us with a normative background for the analysis. An interesting question is how the political system adjusts to the new conditions in designing minority policies. We discuss that such policies have very different implications in the two cases considered.
