Accessible Scale in Small States: Cross-Border Labour, Production, and the Limits of Resident Population

Country size is commonly proxied by territory or resident population, yet these measures can misstate the economic scale available to highly integrated small states. This paper develops the concept of accessible economic scale: the labour, demand, infrastructure, and productive networks that firms and institutions can use without those resources being located inside the political territory or resident population. The framework is motivated by Liechtenstein, where the number of employed persons exceeds the resident population and 57.4 percent of workers were inward commuters at the end of 2024. Cross-border labour is especially important in industry, while firms operate inside a highly open economy connected to Swiss and European markets. The resulting structure also helps explain the unusually large gap between GDP and GNI documented by the IMF: production occurs inside the territory while substantial labour income accrues to non-residents. The paper distinguishes resident scale from accessible scale, identifies labour, market, and infrastructure access as separate channels, and proposes a qualitative Scale-Access Test based on depth, friction, continuity, and bottlenecks. The contribution is not that openness benefits small states, a well-established result. It is the narrower claim that resident population is an incomplete proxy for the productive scale a state can mobilize, and that economic viability depends partly on access to scale beyond the border.