ECONOMIC AND LABOUR MARKET PERFORMANCE: A REGIONAL APPROACH

The paper discusses regional economic performance within Visegrad Group countries. Cohesion policy has become the core policy among economic policies of the European Union. Regional disparities have become a debated topic in the last decades and this paper also deals with development of economic and labour market performance within the context of regional disparities and the convergence process among Visegrad Group countries. The first part of the paper offers a review of approaches to convergence process in the EU New Member States. The empirical part of the paper is based on Eurostat regional data. Using gross domestic product per capita in purchasing power standard data and unemployment rate data, the paper examines trends in regional disparities at the NUTS 2 level during the period 2000-2011. The main conclusion is that regions in New Member States converged to the European mean during the observed period, while the existing regional disparities narrowed.