Abstract: The reduction of EU regional disparities in development levels is a key goal in the European Commission's policy agenda, but there are at least two debatable points that have captured the attention of academics and policymakers: how to measure disparities between regions and the practical meaning of the word development. This paper attempts to contribute to this debate by shedding some light on these two points. First, as different measures have been proposed to evaluate the evolution of (regional) disparities, the report attempts to verify whether all of them roughly convey similar information. Second, given that different (single and composite) indicators, other than the traditional per capita GDP, have been proposed to represent the term development, the paper wants to see whether the conclusions drawn from the use of these single and composite indicators are generally similar to those from the per capita GDP. Regarding inequality measures, the results tended to show that all of them convey more or less the same information, namely, a common time pattern leading to a significant reduction of regional disparities in EU27 during the period 1995-2007. With respect to the development indicators, the results tend to support the conclusion that regional variations in development, whatever indicator is employed, are closely related to variations in per capita GDP.

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