ANALYZING THE DETERMINANTS OF THE EUROPEAN UNION'S REGIONAL ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

The European Union (EU) is a heterogeneous political and economic structure comprising 28 nations, differing in terms of size, population, economic development and institutional efficiency. National socio-economic context determines countries' growth potential and their ability to compete for foreign markets. The socio-economic discrepancies present, respectively, between the Western, Northern, Southern and Eastern EU nations still persist, thus reducing the community's ability to compete on the global market, especially with the USA, Japan and China, which are considered the main powerhouses of the world's economy capable of challenging economic positions of the European Union. Consequently, the present research aims to assess to which extent economic growth determinants in the European Union differ taking into account the regional context. An individual per region regression analysis was developed intending to identify which are the determinants of economic development at the level of EU's geographical regions. The results reached confirm this assumption underlining the fact that there are significant dissimilarities between the motivators of economic progress in the EU. This fact should particularly concern the European elites as these variations determine the further accentuation of development disparities not only among the countries but also between entire groups of states.