Practical experiences, regulatory principles and issues of the territorial delimitation of development policy in Hungary

Abstract

Both at national and EU level, the differentiation of specific territorial units is a key issue in development policy. The objective of the delimitation at the highest legal level is to mitigate territorial differences; it is intended to provide support for the delimited (beneficiary) territorial units. Benefits (e.g. the rate and intensity of support) are fundamentally influenced by development and growth opportunities, so the methods and the results of delimitation are both politically and professionally sensitive. This is particularly important for rural areas and rural development, because the beneficiaries' delimitation -or lack thereofis most affected by these regions. Hungary has been operating and developing a delimitation system since the '90s, the elements of which are at community level can serve as a model, and can be well-utilized. For this purpose, the paper presents the regulatory starting points and principles of spatial delimitation, the statistical methods used so far, the range of data used, and the problems that can be associated with the methods and data used so far. The authors propose a data set and a calculation method that more faithfully reflects the real situation of territorial development, which would enable development resources to better contribute to reducing territorial disparities.

The socio-economic performance of the Hungarian NUTS3 regions between 2010-2020.

“…2022) often do not specify the level of spatial aggregation which they consider relevant. This can be problematic as the spatial variations in different phenomena can be interpreted differently at various levels of aggregation (Finta & Dombi, 2021). At a granular spatial level, for example, where settlements or parts of settlements are the relevant observational units, sociodemographic differences among the population can be huge and the spatial distribution of some natural resources can be highly concentrated at the same time.…”

What Can Hungarian Counties do for the Countryside?

“…Furthermore, many of our interviewees (elected members or officials) were not always open, giving sometimes very general answers, citing their involvement in diverse activities, as their tasks and positions are much less precisely defined or standard, and the distinction between obligatory and voluntary tasks is increasingly blurred. The second project completed in 2019-2022 had a broader focus on governance challenges in peripheral areas and some results have already been published (Horeczki, Pálné, 2022;Finta, Dombi, 2021). In this article, we emphasized only the activities of the Baranya County government, more specifically, the management of the territorial operative programme (TOP) based on documents and interviews.…”