This book offers a comprehensive overview of contemporary issues of regional development. It places particular emphasis on its socio-economic and socio-political determinants which accompany the problem of existing and ever-widening differences in the level of regional development in various parts of Europe. In order to diagnose the scale of those differences and to indicate the main forces behind the divergence of development, the authors propose an original systematisation of regional development factors, drawing attention to the need to consider them within the framework of present-day...