| Summary: | The research objective of the presented study is to find out the consequences of the
EU accession on internal regions in terms of regional convergence or divergence.
The conception of analysis is based on the convergence theory which states that all
industrial systems would converge because of the determinant effects of
technological development. The samples for empirical analysis include NUTS 3
regions within the “new” EU countries (the countries of the former socialist bloc
that entered the EU in 2004 and 2007) and Croatia as a “control country”, the
economic performance of which is measured by real GDP per capita for 2000-
2011, the applied method – basic panel data analysis. The main findings of the
research allow to argue that positively perceived trend of actual declining of
economic performance’s interregional variation within the “new” EU countries is
not the consequence of joining the EU. The basic conclusion with regard to the
results of the research is that the “new” EU countries are undergoing a natural
inverted U-shaped trend of changes of their economic performance’s interregional variation that depends both on the country average GDP’s per capita growth and
on the length of the period of self-development under the conditions of market
economy rather than on the factor of unionization as such within the EU.
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