Regional Disparities in Central and Eastern European Countries: Trends, Drivers and Prospects

Abstract

Growth in Central and East European countries (CEE) is territorially unbalanced, more so than in most other parts of the EU. The benefits of transformation in these countries have been unequally distributed among particular social groups and territories—with the emergence of highly educated and internationally successful professionals and entrepreneurs located mainly in metropolitan areas on the one hand, and structural unemployment, persistent poverty and social exclusion in peripheral regions on the other. These regional imbalances are characterised by a process of metropolisation that has privileged a handful of dynamic urban centres while exacerbating the structural problems of old industrial regions, vast rural areas and regions located on borders, and especially the EU's eastern borders. Different as they are in social, cultural and geographical terms, these declining or stagnating regions share general problems of economic peripherality and many negative effects of structural change, such as rural depopulation, ‘brain drain’, disinvestment and, frequently, below-average levels of socio-economic well-being. This polarised economic and territorial development within CEE poses challenges not only for the respective countries, but also for European cohesion.

Notes

¹ The NUTS classification (Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics) is a hierarchical system for dividing up the economic territory of the EU for the purpose of collecting and analysing regional statistics. NUTS 1 concerns major socio-economic regions; NUTS 2 relates to basic regions for the application of regional policies; and NUTS 3 concerns small regions for specific diagnoses.

² For instance, the migration outflow from Poland in 2004–2008, estimated at some 1.5 million people, was, according to the official statistics, approximately 100,000.

³ On this, for Poland, see Celińska et al. (2010).

The paper presents selected results of the project ‘Regional Development and Regional Policy in CEE Countries’ (No. NN114056236) financed by Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education.