Elements of regional disparities in the new regional pattern

Procedia Economics and Finance, 2014

The analysis of the regional inequality is essential for a country and it is also an important question whether the inequalities are growing or decreasing. The first, shorter part of the paper provides a number of reflections of the existing methods of the examinations of intertemporal change of spatial differences of various socioeconomic indicators, mainly the per capita income. The diverse growth rate of spatial income level of various spatial units (regions, countries, provinces, counties etc.) is a historical-statistical fact which refers to an unrepeatable, unique and particular historical situation. The descriptions of the convergence or divergence of various spatial units in various time periods contribute to our historical knowledge and help to evaluate the effectiveness of regional policy. The subject of the second, larger part of our study is the regional disparities in Hungary. Our approach is mainly historicaldescriptive, but by the help of Hungarian case study many theoretical issues will be presented also. The regional comparison includes the economic

2016

The article analyses the causes of spatial inequalities in post-socialist Hungary from a Marxist approach. Socioeconomic and spatial differentiation between east and west of Hungary is a topic of debate that has gone beyond the acad-emia. Regional disparities of the economic development of the country have increased during the postsocialist transition period and have not improved since the entry into the European Union. In this sense, spatial inequalities are, undoubtedly, the geographical proofs of the capitalist mode of production and to understand the current features of the production and reproduction of these inequalities is necessary to analyse the social conditions such as gender and ethnicity. The rise of regional inequalities in the Hungarian economy since the political change has been accompanied by changes in the division of labour and in the capital and, thus, creating new models of regional disparities in the economy. The unequal development of Hungary at different geog...

2000

The transition process of the Hungarian economy and society began exactly ten years ago, and every part of these systems underwent fundamental change. The country’s regional structure and the spatial economic societal movements followed the transition too, and precisely reflected the step by step altering of the socialist political-economic system and the fast development of the new system. The effects were very spectacular, on both regional and local levels. Workplaces disappeared in large numbers in crisis regions, due to the collapse of some sectors. Regions and settlements found themselves in a crisis. The former normal contacts (e.g.: commuting directions, attraction regions) got rearranged from one day to the next. The people, the households, the participants of the economy and the political-societal actors had to deal with the difficulties of the modernisation in their residential areas, local communities and regions. Therefore knowledge and experience can always be attached ...

As a result of the political and economic transition, the Hungarian spatial pattern of taxable personal incomes restructured significantly. The position of north-eastern Hungary weakened, however, pronounced intraregional inequalities arose due to the uneven collapse of the local economies. The transition reflected the group of settlements categorised by the number of settlements. The detailed spatial income pattern of settlements and the internal and external effects influencing it were represented with the help of the potential model. The changes between 1988 and 2008 were measured by the difference of the summarized potential values. The map of differences illustrated the areas with relative advantages and disadvantages compared to the regional average value. Most of the largest towns were able to maintain or strengthen their positions giving advantage to the suburban settlements in their environs. However, the former peripheries, the mining and heavy industrial zones with a collapsed economic base, suffered the greatest relative loss over the last two decades because of the transition.

2007

In the course of describing regional aspects of social and economic state of development, and exploring its disparities, we can often formulate the question, what forms the spatial characteristics of these phenomenons. When we look for the explanatory factors, we have to analyse a complex system according to the complex components of development, like economic and social aspects, political situation, etc. The state of development of an area can be determined by not only the local conditions mentioned above, but by the location as well. And its relations can be explained in wider range, for example: place, distance from the capital and other economic centres, neighbourhood conditions, etc. Location as an independent variable can be defined by the potential model, which doesn’t value the spatial phenomenons themselves, but it takes them into a system, whose elements have their influence on one another; in this way the model has an important role in the investigation of spatial interactions. Comparing personal per capita income data (which is a good measure to inquire about the developmental conditions) of Hungarian statistical subregions with income potentials, we can answer how location determines development. Besides, analysing the relationship between them, we can supply those aspects, which characterize several typical groups of subregions, and the characteristics of these types help to refine the image of state of development of the Hungarian subregions.

Hungarian Historical Review: New Series of Acta Historica Academiae Scientiarium Hungaricae 8, 1, 121-152., 2019

In this essay, I look for answers to the following three questions: to what extent did the borders of Hungary after the 1920 Treaty of Trianon overlap with borders of structural development in 1910 and in 1930; what does the term “development” mean when we are talking about the Carpathian Basin; and how did geographical differences in standards of living change in the territories under discussion over the course of these two decades. To some extent, the new political borders which were drawn in 1920 in the Carpathian Basin overlapped with the borders which reflected the different levels and patterns of development in the region. This is a consideration which has been given little attention in the secondary literature in Hungary. The developmental structure of the Carpathian Basin in 1910 can be mapped using the GISta Hungarorum Database. One discerns in this structure a major line of development. Within this line, one finds an area in which the level of development was higher than average and, in some places, considerably higher than average. Another distinctive feature of this area was that is had several centers, and this fact was of particular importance from the perspective of the Treaty of Trianon and its alleged consequences. In recent years, groundbreaking research on economic history has persuasively shown that Hungary managed to recover economically relatively quickly after 1920. Numerous factors played a role in this recovery. One of the more decisive, I argue in this study, was the geographical developmental structure of Trianon Hungary, which had several centers. Although the territory of Trianon Hungary was considerably more developed than other areas of the Carpathian Basin, it is quite clear that the economic fault lines which existed after Trianon had in fact existed before Trianon too, and the internal peripheral areas had already formed (and remained essentially unchanged throughout the interwar period). Thus, the Treaty of Trianon did not play any role in the emergence of formation of these areas. The treaty may well have had grave consequences for the country and region, but the developmental geographical structure of Hungary in the interwar period, which ultimately exerted a shaping influence on development in Hungary for the rest of the twentieth century, was not a result of Trianon. Keywords: HDI change, regional differences in development, Interwar Hungary

Földrajzi Értestő, 2004

The basic assumption of the paper is that numerous similarities exist between the patterns of economic growth and territorial capital growth. The rush economic growth and rush growth of territorial capital are compared empirically at Hungarian micro-regional level from 2004 until 2010. After normalizing the dataset, a very novel spatial econometric method is applied, called a penalty for bottleneck. The results show that the constant rush growth of territorial capital is as harmful as economic recession. On the other hand, the decrease of infrastructural and social capital caused the rush growth of territorial capital in this period. Moreover, the key findings of two case studies suggest that the balanced growth of territorial capital will be created by the falling social inequalities and increasing infrastructural capital.

Wschodnioznawstwo

Trends in regional inequalities between 1910 and 1930 in Hungary and the successor states The present article is a summary of a 5-year research on historical peripheries of Hungary between 1910 and 2010. The identification of peripheral zones in Hungary in 1910 – which geographers failed to do up to now – contributed to the assessment of mistargeted regional development planning policies in the last hundred years. On the other hand it also caused debates, because many of the backward areas coincided with regions dominated by ethnic minorities, thus strengthening the opinion of the historians of the successor states that Austria-Hungary oppressed national minorities. The first part of the article summarizes the opinions, interpretations, misunderstandings emerging from this debate around mapping of inequalities and the implementation of geographical methods in historical research. The second part of the article goes further and – by drawing up the regional differences in 2010 – evalu...

Regional Statistics, 2012