REGIONAL GDP GROWTH IN CZECH AND SLOVAK NUTS3 REGIONS: SPATIAL ANALYSIS

Abstrakt

This paper concentrates on the issues of regional GDP growth with orientation on instruments ofspatial analysis. Analyses dealing with the regional economic growth have become very popular during the recent years in order to identify the regional disparities and to adopt appropriate steps to remove them. The important issue of this analysis is consideration of spatial dimension and specification of neighbouring regions based on appropriate definition of spatial weight matrix. Testing of spatial autocorrelation is possible through different statistics, in this paper we applied the global and local Moran’s I statistics and local Getis-Ord Gi statistic.The analysis dealt with 22 NUTS3 Czech and Slovak regions in pre-crisis, crisis and post-crisis period. Since in periods before crisis, i.e. in 2007/2006 and 2008/2007 the statistically significant positive spatial autocorrelation was confirmed, in the crisis period 2009/2008 was the spatial autocorrelation slightly positive, in post-crisis period 2010/2009 there was a negative spatial autocorrelation. Based on local statistics it was possible to detect concrete regions with statistically significant spatial autocorrelation including the type of autocorrelation. Since the positive autocorrelation indicates clustering of regions with similar values of GDP growth rates, on the other hand the negative autocorrelation indicated, in which regions is the GDP growth lower or higher in comparison to neighbouring regions.