**5. Discussion**

From the country-level perspective, most EU countries have regions with different socioeconomic performance and range from Group 1 to Group 5 (such as Italy). Two exceptions are the Netherlands and Sweden, whose regions are mostly classified as part of Group 5 and in some cases Group 4. However, in countries such as Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Latvia, and Estonia, all regions are classified as Groups 1 and 2 (the lowest socio-economic performance). These countries are characterized by the centralized development of the regions around their capital cities (usually the only predominantly urban region). The large gap between capital regions and other regions within one country indicates significant pressure on the capital region to pull development from other regions, often leaving resources in other regions untapped. Such regional inequalities within countries' borders are defined in relation to the capital city–other regions.

Some countries have clear north–south and east–west divisions. In Italy, for example, most regions in the north fall into Group 5, and on Figure 1 they are marked with the darkest colour. This part of Italy is an industrial and service centre, whereas southern

Italy is not. Germany is another example of this east-west division, and is one where inequality between east and west has been an important issue in regional policy since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Unemployment is more prevalent in the east and young and educated people most often most often migrate west. A declining birth rate in the area of the former East Germany and restructuring of the economy has further deepened these divisions [53]. In some countries, regional development mismatches are present as a consequence of historical circumstances, as noted by Biczkowski et al. [54] in the example of Poland. Additionally, according to Adamowicz [55], the Polish regions in the east are less developed and have poorer socioeconomic performances. Gorzelak [30] argues that regional differences in CEE countries draw on legacies from the earlier period and that, within most newly formed countries, there are significant regional differences in which the eastern parts are less economically developed than those in the west of the countries. This is attributed to the proximity of western regions to the highly developed EU-15 countries, and that the positive economic effects have "spilled over" into the western regions of these newer members. According to Figure 1, this appears to be the case in Poland as well as in the regions of the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY), which now belong to the separate countries of Slovenia, Croatia, and Serbia (the other former SFRY countries, Northern Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Montenegro, were not included in the analysis). Specifically, the best socioeconomic performance was identified in the intermediate and predominantly rural regions of Slovenia. This could be due to the fact that the Slovene private sector has historically been one of the largest recipients in Central and Eastern Europe of financing from highly developed countries [56].

There was also a clear difference in the level of socioeconomic performance between the EU-15, and especially in the area encompassing Northern Italy, Austria and Germany, part of France, the Benelux, the United Kingdom, and the NMS. This is the current state of historical patterns of urbanization in the EU and it comprises Europe's metropolitan core. This pattern was observed as far back as 1989, when a group of French geographers, led by Roger Brunet, defined an area of Europe, later referred to as the "Blue Banana", that was highly urbanized and industrialized, and which connected regions from Manchester and London in the United Kingdom to Lombardy in Italy, passing through the Benelux countries, France, and the western part of Germany and Austria [29].

Of course, these regional differences between the EU-15 and NMS do not apply to all CEE regions (e.g., Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Poland). Mostly the regions near the capitals are able to offer better conditions for the development of other branches of the economy (tourism, trade, the financial sector, etc.). As is illustrated in Figure 1, the eastern part of the EU from the Baltic countries, eastern Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Serbia (candidate country), Croatia to Greece, is characterized by areas with the lowest socioeconomic performance, i.e., a high share of the primary sector in employment and GVA, low GDP per capita, and insufficient productivity levels for the entire economy and the primary sector. In some former socialist states, the situation is better, for example in western parts of Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia, while the regions of Romania, Bulgaria, and Serbia are the majority in Group 1, which have the lowest socioeconomic performance, and the highest share of the economy is in the primary sector. According to a European Commission report, some former socialist states have completed the process of agricultural reconstruction through the transfer of labour from agriculture to other sectors (Czech Republic and Slovakia), while in some NMS such as Romania and Bulgaria, during the transition, the share of employment in agriculture increased due to governmen<sup>t</sup> investment in agricultural enterprises, which were the legacy of the centrally planned economy, in order to reduce unemployment [52].
