Is the Regional Divergence a Price for the International Convergence? The Case of the Visegrad Group

Abstract

The main goal of this article is to verify whether the Visegrad Group countries are achieving social convergence at national level at the expense of internal divergence. For this purpose, the existence of social beta-, sigma-and gamma-convergence at national and regional level was tested. The author of this article decided to tackle the convergence problem since there is a high risk that countries are trying to catch up at international level even at the expense of increasing internal differences. This trade off could be framed as undesirable from a cohesion policy point of view. Achieving convergence is not only important for inhabitants' standard of living but for regions' and countries' competitiveness as well. In today's turbulent and globalised world, regions must become more resilient and competitive, and this cannot be done without adequate human capital. Dealing with present unsustainable trends of many kinds, regions are forced to create the best living conditions in order to avoid the brain drain. In this article, a spatial taxonomy measure of development (Pietrzak, 2016) was used to compare the Visegrad Group countries performance with respect to their internal cohesion in the period of 2004-2014. It seems that the inclusion of spatial relationships is justified because nowadays, no region develops in isolation. Therefore, the situation in each region is influenced by neighbourhood.

Multiple-criteria analysis of regional entrepreneurship conditions in Poland

“…The obtained results are consistent not only with the recent previous research of other authors, which concentrated on the problems of standard of living and sustainable development at the regional level in Poland (Kuc, 2017;Pietrzak et al, 2017), but the obtained general picture is analogous to the situation from the previous decade (see Malina, 2004). These results can confirm that the transformation process of Polish economy has resulted in structurally long-term pattern of economic growth that is far from reaching the objectives of spatial sustainability.…”

“…These factors are especially important for Poland, which on the one hand, is the biggest country in Central Europe, thus, it is an economy with big potential for taking advantage of economies of scale. But on the other hand, Poland is commonly considered as the country facing the problem of regional divergence and significant regional disparities (Kuc, 2017;Bartkowiak-Bakun, 2017). In that case, improving entrepreneurship conditions cannot be only the objective of national policy, but it should be also the aim implemented at the regional and the local level.…”

Winners and losers of rapid growth in Turkey: Analysis of the spatial variability of convergence

“…Rey and Janikas () highlighted the rapid surge in the number of applied studies on convergence theory. Among others evidence put forward in Arbia, Battisti, and Di Vaio (), James and Campbell (), Royuela and García (), Kuc (), Pietrzak and Balcerzak () and Wojcik () point out that spatial dimension is moving towards the mainstream and becoming an indispensable part of the convergence models.…”

Regional Income Differences and their Evolution after EU Accession. The Evidence from Visegrad Countries

“…A great deal of research on convergence has been focused on the V4 countries. These researches, which have intensified since the accession of V4 countries to the EU, have concentrated mainly on the β and σ convergence processes (Kisiala, Bajerski, & Stepinski, 2017;Kuc, 2017;Simionescu, 2014), as well as on factors affecting the convergence process and its effects. Among the numerous studies, Ivanová & Čepel (2018) focused on innovation and competitiveness.…”