Regional Differentiation of the New Member States of the European Union

The transformation of the economies of the Central and Eastern European states on a regional level was characterized by different tendencies. In all the new EU Member States there has been from the beginning of the 1990s to today a continuous deepening of regional disparities on the economic level, which are the result of a number of economic, social and geographical factors. This article is a contribution to regional differentiation studies of the new EU Member States. The goal of this article is to explore the trends in and key causes of regional differentiation at the economic level of the new EU Member States. The article is structured in three parts. In the first part the main trends in regional disparities in the territory of the new EU Member States will be charted; in the second part, on the basis of empirical findings, the development of the regional disparities in selected states during the period of 1995 to 2003 will be described, and in the final part the most important factors that lead to the increase in regional disparities will be analysed. The examined sample consists of eight new EU Member States: the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia (the analysis leaves out two states: Malta and Cyprus).