A comparison of the development of regional disparities in the EU countries during the economic crisis

There are many regional development theories already dealing with development of regional differences and their trends. In the European context is regional development linked with terms like convergence/divergence and related to the basic principles of the European Union Cohesion Policy, which goal is a higher level of integration and compensation of regional differences among member states' regions. Currently is this topic closely associated with last years' significant phenomenon - the economical crisis. The aim of this thesis is to compare the regional development among the European Union member states during the recent economical crisis by analysing regional differentiation on levels NUTS 2 and NUTS. The regional differentiation was calculated using two variability indices (Theil index and the coefficient of variation) and based on the unemployment rate and Gross Domestic Product per capita. Arising from the main hypothesis the bimodality of old versus new member states was partially confirmed, which was more evident using the unemployment rate. Finally the cluster analysis was used to create groups of states on the basis of similarity in the development of differentiation during the crisis. The results didn't show significant dependence according to the proposed hypotheses. The real impact of the..