EU Cohesion and Its Evaluation in the Case of Visegrad Four Countries

Although the European Union is one of the most developed economic integrations in the world, there are significant disparities between countries and regions across all twenty seven EU Member States. This has a negative impact on the balanced development in the European Union. It affects also the level of global EU performance and competitiveness in the world economy because the competitiveness is highly related with the imbalance development in economic, social and territorial cohesion. Support of coherent and balanced development of EU countries and regions represents, together with the increasing competitiveness of the European territory, two main development objectives of the EU which are not mutually exclusive but rather complementary. Development of the Central European countries in the Visegrad Group (Czech, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia) after the accession to the EU was affected by the objectives of the EU Lisbon Strategy and particular after 2010 by new growth concept of Strategy Europe 2020. The objective of paper is to analyze the cohesion of the European Union on the example of the Visegrad Four (V4) countries. Theoretical background of the paper sets out the methodological concept of cohesion in the EU and is further focused on the possibility of its evaluation at national level. The empirical part of the paper deals with multi-criteria evaluation of cohesion in the V4 countries by selected EU Structural indicators and indicators of Strategy Europe 2020, which appropriately reflect the level of economic, social and territorial cohesion. The analysis of selected indicators of national disparities in the V4 countries uses selected scaling and statistical methods, especially the traffic light method and point method. On the basis of the point method application in a final part of the paper, the cross country comparison of scores for all selected indicators in examined countries is surveyed and all scores are summarized in a given time. This approach can determine the overall level of disparities between V4 countries and to provide assessment of achieved level of their development potential.