V originále
Reducing regional disparities within the European Union is one of the main objectives of EU cohesion policy. One way to monitor the failure/success of the above policy is to compare certain indicators assessing the level of human development. For this purpose, the aim of the paper was to create a composite index at the regional level (IRD—Index of Regional Development) in some Central European countries (Czech Republic, Hungary, and Slovakia) in the years between two crises: the global crisis and the crisis caused by the COVID-19. This index was created from 12 socioeconomic indicators: three economic indicators, three indicators of education, three indicators of health, and three indicators of the living standard. Afterward, the min-max method was used to construct the above index of regional development. The same variable weights were used to calculate this Index. In order to eliminate their double counting, the Pearson correlation coefficient was used. The created indexes were compared in years 2010 and 2019. Based on the principles of cohesion policy, assumptions about reducing regional disparities were ascertained and confirmed in the monitored economies.