Catching up and/or following at a distance? On the prospect of the regions of the Visegrad countries

Abstract

The four Visegrad countries, the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, and Slovakia acceded to the European Union in 2004. Their inhabitants had high hopes of the accession, and according to more eager expectations, their standard of living could have caught up with that of the developed Western members within a few years. “Catching up”, “rapprochement” and “convergence” are multi-layered concepts used in various interpretations, but in less developed countries and regions they have been desired aims for around the last one and a half centuries. It is also one of the key objectives of European Union regional policy to accelerate the development of less developed regions and bring them up to level with the rest of the member states.

In our study we examine the success of the catching-up process of this four, historically and socio-economically similar, moderately developed post-socialist countries between 2000 and 2014. We take the NUTS3 level as the basis of examination. Our key question is whether there was an observable process of catching up and, if yes, was it similar or significantly different for the different counties. We analyze GDP per capita trends in Purchasing Power Standard, and we study catching up inequalities with the help of entropy based Theil indexes. We provide a detailed analysis of two influencing factors, namely national processes and the possible role of the counties’ largest cities as beneficiaries of potential agglomeration economies.

Based on the data, catching up is evident in the case of all four countries, although along two different trajectories. While the Czech and Hungarian economies halted between 2006 and 2008, the Slovakian and Polish economies developed relatively steadily throughout. In terms of achieved level and catching up, we categorized four county types. The county development is determined by the country effect and the role of national economic policies and institutions, including regional policy and regional development. The dynamic and high-level development of capital regions, especially in the case of Warsaw and Bratislava, is outstanding, while Budapest and its region, and Prague to some extent have stagnated in the past years.

The population of the counties, and of their largest city in particular, is closely linked to the pace of catching up and the achieved level. All of the metropolitan regions reached a high level, but they strongly varied in terms of extent. In case of counties having a town of fewer than about 100 thousand inhabitants, both the achieved level and the extent of catching up correlated with the size of their largest city, presumably exploiting localization agglomeration economies. The role of settlement network is evident in the success of catching up, like in the case of the Polish polycentric settlement system, while in Hungary the “second-tier” towns were too small to provide a seat for the global corporates.