Summary:

Self-government organization started their chase after funds for infrastructural investments already several years ago. Each year a growing number of selfgovernments use the EU money accessible from various programmes and preaccession funds. However, their importance has grown since 2003 owing to radically increased amount of funding allocated for investments carried out by selfgovernments from means of coherence funds and equalization funds targeting particularly rural areas. The highest increase, exceeding 500 per cent was registered in rural minicipalities. More importantly not only the amount of obtained means increased but primarily the number of self-governments using the subsidies. The most serious hazard is connected with a group of municipalities which do not get any subsidies. It is due to problems they have with providing their own financial input, necessary for project application. No subsidies can be obtained if municipalities do not declare their own contribution. This leads to the outcomes contrary to the assumptions of the EU cohesion policy. Its main objective is equalizing development of all regions and not strengthening or increasing the differences. The analysis was conducted to seek correlations between the rate of development of infrastructure in the rural areas and selected budget ratios characterizing financial conditions of municipalities. The analysis focuses on 1995-2005, i.e. the years immediately before and after Poland’s accession into the EU structures. Municipalities situated within three southern counties of the śląskie province and selected for the analysis cover the Bielsko-Biała sub-region. The terrain is relatively diversified which results from its submontane location. However, current level of infrastructure development is affected not only by geographical or topological conditions but by its history. The Biała River flowing through the city of Bielsko-Biała for many years used to mark a frontier between the Kingdom of Poland (then Republic of Poland) and the Czech Kingdom (Austria), whcih after the 1st partition of Poland was the frontier of Galicia. The analysis of present state of the infrastructure makes possible defining the most important limitations delaying further development of the studied municipalities. The first attempt at an analysis involved an assessment of linear trends of development and their correlations with linear trends of municipal incomes. REGLIMP function was used for this purpose. The data were obtained from CSO (Central Statistical Office) and then processed using Microsoft Excel Programme, while correlation was conducted by means of Statistica 6.0 Pl . A lack of significant relationships between correlants was an impulse for further data analysis. It was found that the development of a majority of studied elements cannot be described using linear function. Therefore, as the next step exponential function was used, which projects the actual increment in all of its periods. The least squares method was used to compute the exponential curve. Computations point to a strong correlation between synthetic index of development of all analysed elements of infrastructure and own incomes of municipal budgets. It is interesting that no significant correlations were found in individual elements such as water supply system, gas from gas grid or roads. Sewer system was an exception. It is the most rapidly developing element of infrastructure and its correlation coefficient with means obtained for co-financing own tasks from other sources reached the value of 0.89. However, analysis of results revealed that the methods applied in the work do not fully reflect the real relationships between incomes received by municipal budgets and the state of infrastructure. It results mainly from the time consuming character of the investments. In the case of water supply and sewer system the invested means often produce a measurable effect but only in the subsequent years. Therefore it seems justifiable that further analyses should use autocorrelation methods, including spatial autocorrelation with shifts by (t + n) periods selected in the way to allow determining, for the selected time series, to which extent individual term in an order depends on the preceding terms.