The Analysis of the Competitiveness of Polish Regions in the Context of the Influence of Growth Centres

The article discusses the topic of regional competitiveness, which refers to the ability of a region, measured in relation to other regions, to guarantee a socioeconomic environment that supports economic activity and the process of raising the general level of productivity and innovation using internal and external human, financial and material resources. The aim of the article is to examine the existence of links between the development of the region and the presence of strong growth centres in it in the form of metropolises. For this purpose, the study uses data from the European Commission on the competitiveness of regions from the reports of Regional Competitiveness Indexes (RCI), which allows for the analysis of development changes between EU regions. The t-Student test was used to test the hypothesis on the occurrence of statistically significant differences between the group of regions with and without metropolises. The research part of the article is supplemented by an analysis using the cluster method, which allowed the grouping of Polish regions into clusters with a similar level of competitiveness.