Pareto Chart: A Tool to Evaluate Development of Regional Disparities

Abstract

This paper seeks to demonstrate how the Pareto chart can be used as a tool to evaluate development of regional disparities. The introduction of the chart is followed by its application to the regions of Visegrad Group states. The σ-convergence approach has been used as a benchmark to examine the estimates arrived at using Pareto chart. The results found that Pareto chart has a good predicative ability, since all conclusions of its application on regional disparities development have been confirmed by σ-convergence analysis. Moreover, the chart includes additional information about changes in some sample sections, growth, and eventually order. This extra information may be used to develop more comprehensive conclusions about changes in disparities over time. Furthermore, interpretation of the chart is very easy and calls for no extra knowledge acquisition in its use, which is an advantage for other fields’ researchers, bureaucracy and political decision makers, and both expert and non-expert public. With all that in mind, we guess the Pareto chart is a very interesting tool to evaluate development of regional disparities, which can be used as the sole source of information or as a complement to another approaches of disparity measurement.