The dynamics of GDP (gross domestic product) and its spatial distribution are constantly at the forefront of economic and regional studies. This study intends to understand better Hungarian subnational economic processes by checking the predictive capacity of various extrapolative forecasting techniques with out-of-sample testing. The author focuses on a top-down projection method that allocates regional GDP based on an existing, external, national-level, long-term projection. GDP is analysed in its aggregate value and in a decomposition followed in the growth accounting literature. The main question of the out-of-sample tests is the level of usefulness of historical national-and regional-level data in predicting Hungarian regional-level GDP in the long run. The author proposes a specific weighting scheme that combines past regional-level growth rates and predicted national-level growth rates to arrive at different regional-level predictions. She concludes that during the relatively short test period, the average historical interregional distribution did not have a determining role in predicting future regional GDP values. The nationallevel growth processes largely explain regional-level GDP, and the use of certain combinations of past regional-level growth rates and predicted national-level growth rates are recommended to project regional GDP in the long run.

A gazdasági növekedés és annak területi különbségei folyamatosan a hazai regionális tudományi kutatások előterében vannak. Tanulmányunk célja, hogy területi statisztikai adatok alapján azonosítsa az ezredforduló óta mutatkozó főbb trendeket, és az ezekből levezethető hosszú távú megyei növekedési pályákat 2060-ig bezárólag. A gazdasági növekedést tényezőkre bontva vizsgáljuk, ami által lehetőségünk van területi egységenként elkülöníteni a demográfiai mutatók, a termelékenység és a foglalkoztatás változásának a hatását a gazdasági kibocsátásra. A tanulmányunk második felében e tapasztalatokból kiindulva, egy felülről építkező szemléletben hosszú távú előrejelzéseket készítünk a megyei növekedési pályákra, figyelemmel a négy növekedési tényező elkülönített hatására. A kutatásunk célja nem pontos, számszerű előrejelzések készítése, hanem „mi lenne, ha…” típusú kérdések felvetése és körüljárása. Két területi forgatókönyvet vizsgálunk, amelyek egyike időben csökkenő ütemű területi differenciálódást vetít előre, a másik pedig időben folyamatosan növekvő különbségeket feltételez. Eredményeink rámutatnak arra, hogy a gazdaság területi koncentrálódása a jövőben is folytatódhat, és a kedvezőtlen demográfiai folyamatok miatt a fenntartható felzárkózás forrása hosszú távon kisebb súllyal a foglalkoztatás további javulásából, és nagyobb súllyal a munkatermelékenység javulásából származhat.

Our comparative research examines the changes in the economic position of two rural regional centres, Cluj-Napoca and Pécs, in the post-crisis period. The focus of our interest is the sectoral structure of the local economies in the light of the concept of 'foundational economy'. Our empirical research covers data from the largest local firms in each of the two cities, as well as regionally aggregated data, analysed from a labour productivity perspective with exploratory statistical methods. The source of our data is the Orbis Europe enterprise database, supplemented by EuroStat data at regional level. Our results suggest that due to the large weight of the foundational economy in both cities, it should be considered an important driver of long-term territorial development and local well-being. There are several sectors in the local economy of the two cities where some activities of the foundational economy excel in productivity, thus we cannot establish a direct contradiction between the high weight of the foundational economy and lower efficiency.

Economic development at the national level is often accompanied by territorial divergence at sub-national levels, which phenomenon became even more noticeable during and after the global financial and economic crisis. Current development policy have to face the well-known equity versus efficiency challenge to sustain the prosperity of the most advanced regions and, at the same time, to tackle the divergence between advanced and lagging regions. For this reason, a comprehensive knowledge is necessary about the long-run, interdependent dynamics of national and regional level growth. Our research contributes to this knowledge through studying alternative growth paths for Hungary in a comparative framework. We focus on the methods that apply a regionalisation procedure in order to downscale national level economic forecasts to the regional level.

The information society has become a crucial area of the socio-economic processes over the last two to three decades, yet it was unable to reduce the differences between the development levels of different regions. The developed regions perform better and poorer regions have weaker performance in the development of info-communication technologies. It can be assumed that the lack of the info-communication tools may broaden the divide between the developed and underdeveloped regions. Therefore, it is important to measure and mitigate these differences. The results of such measurements may contribute to the formation of the regional development policy issues. This paper focuses on the analysis of the factors that play a role in the information society. These factors can help to characterize the information society on both the national and the sub-national level. Our goal is to investigate the territorial inequalities in the information society on a highly disaggregated level since the article studies the relative development of the settlements in the South Transdanubian Region. As a methodological background, we introduce a new and composite index referred to as "the territorial index of information society", which relies on settlement and micro-regional level data collected by the Central Statistical Office of Hungary and other private institutions.Our results indicate that the best performing settlements are in micro-regions with advantageous positions and that they are the more populated towns or locate within their agglomeration. The less populated settlements in an underdeveloped micro-region have a more disadvantageous position in the information society. Therefore, the information readiness may create differences in a similar way to economic development.