Analysis of the economic development of districts in Poland as a basis for the framing of regional policies

2004 six major socio-economic regions according to The Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics (NUTS) were established. The so called NUTS1 regions were formed as groups of voivodships (NUTS2 regions). Some of the authorities expressed their concerns that joining better regions with less developed in one might raise GDP per capita statistic in region, thus reducing the expected flows of structural funds. In the paper we try to verify these concerns. We study the level of economic development of all districts in Poland, and its spatial diversification, using the methods of synthetic taxonomic indexes of development and clustering methods.