The change of Hungary’s political and economic system brought about fundamental changes in the social-economic conditions of this country. As a consequence, there has been a significant transformation in the spatial structure too.
Changes in spatial structure were primarily driven by dynamic factors, such as foreign capital influx and crisis phenomena, especially high unemployment which reached its peak in 1993. As a result of these trends, today’s spatial structure is characterised both by fast developing regions (the region of the capital city and North-Western Transdanubia) and by regions which find it difficult to catch up (North-Eastern Hungary).

The 1996 Act on spatial development and physical planning requires that the government reports on a two-yearly basis to Parliament on the course of spatial processes and the implementation of spatial development policy. The first report was prepared in 2000 and accepted by Parliamentary decree no. 39/2001. (VI. 18.) in 2001.

The examination of spatial processes is based on the statistics from 1991 to 1998. The examination of the degree to which spatial development policy was achieved, where possible, included data from 1999 and 2000 in its calculations. The spatial levels of the review: counties in summary level, only counties with regard to certain subject areas (when county-level data were available), municipalities when local data were known, statistical micro-regions as aggregation levels and regions as aggregation scale.The Report made use of data from the Central Statistical Office, data, sectoral data and information from the Spatial Information System, data from the National Tax and Financial Audit Office and in certain topics a database, compiled by means of questionnaires.

Of the various financial instruments available for spatial development the direct spatial development instruments play a relatively marginal role (5-6 %). Experience shows that these financial instruments in themselves are insufficient to guarantee the effective implementation of spatial development policy. In addition to increasing the development resources, there is also a need to have a more extensive spatial decentralisation of these resources in order to speed up the process of catching up.

VÁTI Hungarian Public Nonprofit Company for Regional Development and Town Planning
Hungary
http://www.vati.hu
Mr András Nagy (Counselior), tel. +36 1 244 3265

01/06/2001

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VÁTI Hungarian Public Nonprofit Company for Regional Development and Town Planning

research

Urban Policy