IS THE REGIONAL DIVERGENCE A PRICE FOR THE INTERNATIONAL CONVERGENCE? THE CASE OF THE VISEGRAD GROUP

The main goal of this article is to verify whether the Visegrad Group countries are achieving social convergence at national level at the expense of internal divergence. For this purpose, the existence of social beta-, sigma-and gamma-convergence at national and regional level was tested. The author of this article decided to tackle the convergence problem since there is a high risk that countries are trying to catch up at international level even at the expense of increasing internal differences. This trade off could be framed as undesirable from a cohesion policy point of view. Achieving convergence is not only important for inhabitants' standard of living but for regions' and countries' competitiveness as well. In today's turbulent and globalised world, regions must become more resilient and competitive, and this cannot be done without adequate human capital. Dealing with present unsustainable trends of many kinds, regions are forced to create the best living conditions in order to avoid the brain drain. In this article, a spatial taxonomy measure of development (Pietrzak, 2016) was used to compare the Visegrad Group countries performance with respect to their internal cohesion in the period of 2004-2014. It seems that the inclusion of spatial relationships is justified because nowadays, no region develops in isolation. Therefore, the situation in each region is influenced by neighbourhood.