The analysis of an interregional cohesion in Central Europe with aspect on border regions

The results of a comparative analysis of the economic situation in 2007 still confirms the evident effects of the long years lasting political and economic division by “Iron curtain” and different level of development between regions of new and old member states of the EU. Among Central European regions is in general a deep gap in economic development between new member states´ regions and the German and Austrian ones, except of the capital cities’ regions. The analysis empirically confirms the trend of slow cohesion among NUTS 3 regions in the Central European area as a whole. Anyway, among these regions in the new member states, there are evident increasing disparities; these are due to the dynamic growth in a few regions, mostly in the regions of capital cities. However, the values of interregional disparities are still high even in Germany and statistical data and computations show lasting effects of the former division of the western and eastern part of Germany. Obviously, just the quantitative analysis cannot give uniformly valid explanation of the nature of disparities. Regardless of the border barriers, analysis does not bring the evidence of strong differences in socio-economic situation between NUTS 3 border and inland regions in Central Europe. Some border areas are even more developed than inland regions as western border regions of Austria or the region of ‘Bratislavský kraj’. This brings the positive evidence of the Cross-border cooperation and development transfer in this area. The fast developing regions in the period 2000-2007 were almost all Czech and Slovak, some Hungarian and few Polish ones. That means that these have been having the biggest share on closing of the overall gap in economic development between EU 15 and EU 12 in Central Europe since 2000. As to disparities in unemployment rates, the results of quantitative analyses, without considering territorial and other aspects, often do not show any simple and clear evidence in interpretation based on their values. The data shows the stronger difference among the German regions than for example among the Czech ones. Especially East German regions suffer from very high unemployment rates. Polish and East Slovak regions are as well among that ones with high unemployment rates. On the other hand, Austria has kept the lowest unemployment rates in all its regions, except of the region of the capital city. Austria is the country that has positive values in all regional indicators. It has above EU-27 average HDP/capita levels, low unemployment rates and low level of disparities according to the both mentioned indicators in time. Germany has the strongest economic regions in its country but as well problematic ones and indicates relatively high level of interregional disparities that is just slowly disappearing. Among the new member countries have the best results Czech regions according its HDP per capita levels and growth, relatively low unemployment rates and interregional disparities if the values of the region of the capital city are not considered. It was empirically proved that without this region there are very low interregional disparities in the Czech Republic. Disparities among regions in new member countries in GDP/capita are generated mostly by the region of the capital cities where the growth since 2000 has been fast. Anyway, the size of regions on the NUTS 3 level is in small and middle sized countries in Central Europe quite large and its number small. This causes inequalities in comparisons, especially in the framework of Cross Border Cooperation. Most of NUTS 3 regions (more than 70%) are often considered according to the CBC framework as the border regions. In the Slovak republic there are even all regions defined as border regions. However, the analyses demonstrated that these regions in Central Europe that are eligible to utilize the financial support from the European Regional Development Fund in the framework of Cross- Border Cooperation perform stronger convergence in comparison to the others NUTS 3 regions (as in Graph N12).