REGION CLUSTERING IN THE SLOVAK REPUBLIC FROM THE SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT POINT OF VIEW

Research, measurement and reduction of interregional differences is for a long time stable and hot discussions topic of expert community, politicians, academics and other entities responsible for regional development not only in Slovakia. Submitted paper aims to assess the status of (in 2013 depending on the availability of statistical data) inter-regional differences in the Slovak Republic from the aspect of sustainable development and through cluster analysis to create clusters of NUTS level 3 regions, which are each other most similar (we expected they have a common root causes) in terms of chosen available regional economic, social, environmental and institutional indicators. The reason for our approach is to focus attention to other economic, but mainly non-economic aspects of regional development and regional policy, searching for the cause successful progress in some areas of mutual confrontation with others, significantly lagging regions. We use partial outputs of cluster analysis to examine conditions and development of inter-regional differences in Slovakia in order to reveal the common problems facing regions, common and different causes of their backwardness and propose tools, interventions that we consider appropriate to use when implementing regional policy in order to mitigate inter-regional disparities