Geographical context of the revealed competitiveness of urbanised areas in Hungary excluding the Budapest agglomeration

Abstract

The processes of economic globalization have transformed socio-economic spatial functioning of the territories. These trends caused international competition between countries, regions, and settlements. According to this, nowadays, the examination of competitiveness has become an important research question in economic geography. The aim of our study is to examine the scale-dependent processes of revealed competitiveness of agglomerations, agglomerating areas, and settlement groups in Hungary excluding the Budapest agglomeration. The study was based on quantitative research methods using an empirical database and mathematical statistical methods. Firstly, we conducted a Principal Component Analysis (PCA) of revealed competitiveness in different geographical scales and afterwards, we utilized the method of Spatial Autocorrelation on a settlement level. Our findings showed that there are significant spatial differences among the performance of the Hungarian urbanised areas. The east-west dichotomy considering competitiveness despite the European Unions’ developmental funds is still present between Agglomerations, Agglomerating areas, and Settlement groups in Hungary. Moreover, according to our calculations, intra-regional polarization and scale mechanism are in connection with revealed competitiveness and it is justified by spatial autocorrelation.

Keywords

• revealed competitiveness
• scale
• agglomerations
• agglomerating areas
• settlement groups
• Hungary