THE TRADE-OFF BETWEEN NATIONAL GROWTH AND INTERREGIONAL INEQUALITY: THREE DECADES OF REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT IN SLOVAKIA

Abstract

The article deals with regional development in Slovakia during the last 30 years. In the overview part, we elaborate on the theoretical framework and contextual conditions of regional development in the transformation and integration period. In the empirical part, we discuss the trade-off theory of national growth and regional inequality in the context of the Kuznets-Williamson inverted U hypothesis (if growth is maintained, inequalities increase in the initial stage and decrease in the advanced stage of economic development). The aim of this paper is to uncover the trend and scale of regional inequalities. The results of our work confirm that Slovakia has entered the second stage of regional development, in which regional inequality decreases, but at the cost of falling behind the EU27 and decline in economic performance of Bratislava.