UNLIKE San Diego and Tijuana, Seattle and Vancouver are both rich and speak the same language. But connections between Washington state’s commercial capital and Canada’s biggest western city are sparse. Professionals in Seattle have more contacts in Atlanta, across the continent, than in Vancouver, just 190km (118 miles) away, according to an analysis of LinkedIn data by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG). Vancouverites talk more to people in San Francisco than in Seattle.

Seeking to profit by doing more together, last month Washington state’s governor, Jay Inslee, and the premier of British Columbia, Christy Clark, agreed to create the “Cascadia Innovation Corridor”, named for the Cascade mountains that range up the Pacific coast of North America.

It is not a partnership of equals. The Seattle area hosts such behemoths as Microsoft, Amazon and Boeing; Vancouver’s biggest tech company is Telus, which provides telecoms services mainly in Canada. High-tech industry accounts for 22% of Washington’s GDP; its contribution to British Columbia’s smaller economy is just 7%. Venture-capital firms invest five times more in Seattle than they do in Vancouver.