Examining regional role of industrial production in transformation of Hungarian economic structure

Abstract

Following the economic crisis of 2008, most developed countries, including the European Union member states, have experienced an economic paradigm shift. The rethinking of economic production has led to a shift towards knowledge-intensive, innovative and high-tech industries. As a result, today’s technological innovations are having a markedly more mature and powerful impact on changes in social relations, the labour market and its strategic development. As it has been observed in the technological innovations of recent decades, the industrial sector (manufacturing, energy, IT, automotive) has played a prominent role. At the macroeconomic level, almost all of the strategically comprehensive innovations have been closely linked to the development of this sector. All these visible macroeconomic links have led us to focus our attention on the strengthening of industrial production and its regional disparities, and to explore the regional differentiation in development resulting from FDI. We have chosen the period 2008-2020 as the interval for our analysis, in which we have examined the correlation between the value of industrial production per capita and its changes, as well as the spatial distribution of the value of industrial production. In our study, we sought to answer the question of how spatial inequalities in production change as the value of industrial production increases, and, in a complex model, how the level and unequal spatial distribution of foreign direct investment affect the development of a given economic space in Hungary.