REGIONAL INEQUALITY IN THE EUROPEAN UNION: SEARCHING FOR AN INDICATOR OF MEASUREMENT

Abstract

This article attempts to find an indicator for measuring territorial inequality with the further aim of revealing the specific nature of the influence of public authorities on the "most deviant regions". The study is based on the regions of the European Union countries, which enshrined the principles of economic and social cohesion and the fight against both inter-country and intra-country inequality in the Single European Act back in 1992. A "region" is understood to be a “meso-level” of public authority, located between the national level and local government; administrative-territorial units (ATUs) with their own authorities. As a result, the total number of observations in this study is 350 units - all ATUs that correspond to the concept of a region in 21 EU member states. Quantitative comparative analysis and correlation analysis are used as research methods. The key indicator for measuring regional inequality in EU countries is gross domestic product per capita (for the period 2014-2022), the validity of which is verified by poverty indicators and the human development index. The empirical basis of the study was provided by datasets from the official EU website (Eurostat, https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/) and the Global Data Lab database (https://globaldatalab.org/). As a result of calculating the per capita GDP in standard deviations, the most deviating cases were identified – regions with the highest/lowest inequality values, which lays the foundation for future research on institutional decisions of supranational and national authorities in reducing regional inequality.