Geographical proximity, common historical roots and collaboration within the Nordic Council make the Nordic countries, often wrongly treated as monoliths. However, in reality, Nordic regions differ in terms of broadly defined social and economic development. Issues concerning the standard of living are one of the priorities of the Helsinki Treaty signed by Nordic countries. The main goal of this paper is to analyze the existence...

Research background: Geographical proximity, common historical roots and collaboration within the Nordic Council cause the Nordic countries to be often wrongly treated as monoliths. However, in reality, Nordic regions differ in terms of broadly defined social and economic development. Issues concerning the standard of living are one of the priorities of the Helsinki Treaty signed by Nordic countries. Purpose of the article: The...

The main goal of this article is to analyze the social convergence process using Markov chains. In this research, term social convergence refers to the reduction of dispersion in the standard of living among countries. The use of Markov chains in the social convergence analysis allowed describing movements of observational units within the distribution and providing more details about the mechanism of the convergence process. A...

The main goal of this article is to verify whether the Visegrad Group countries are achieving social convergence at national level at the expense of internal divergence. For this purpose, the existence of social beta-, sigma- and gamma-convergence at national and regional level was tested. The author of this article decided to tackle the convergence problem since there is a high risk that countries are trying to catch up at...