Human Capital in the Visegrad Group NUTS 2 Regions. Convergence or Divergence?
Human Capital in the Visegrad Group NUTS 2 Regions. Convergence or Divergence?

Summary/Abstract: An important objective of the European Union cohesion policy is to remove economic disparities between the various regions. One of the factors capable of stimulating or slowing the development process is human capital. The specialist literature provides many alternative human capital measurement concepts. In quantitative research, various composite measures are most commonly used. Such a measure was also developed in this study. The main aims of the study were: to construct a human capital measure for the Visegrad Group countries’ NUTS 2 regions, to examine whether spatial relationships occur in the distribution of human capital in the studied area and to analyze regional convergence in terms of human capital levels in the years 2001–2015. The study applied the marginal vertical beta-convergence concept, which enables the determination of individual contributions of particular regions to the general convergence process characterizing all the studied objects. Dynamic panel data models were used to study convergence, and Moran’s global and local statistics were used for inference about spatial dependencies. As expected, no spatial autocorrelation was found. In contrast, the hypothesis of convergence was confirmed and regions that contribute to the weakening of its pace were identified.

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